


'A hundred hours' DVD extra notes

by breathedout



Series: 'A hundred hours' plus meta [2]
Category: A hundred hours
Genre: 'A hundred hours' meta, Archived From Tumblr, Archived from havingbeenbreathedout blog, Meta Essays, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-08
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-09-30 21:57:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 24
Words: 29,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17231921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: Meta commentary about the writing process on 'A hundred hours': originally posted to Tumblr and archiving here for posterity as part of my transition away from that platform.Chapters here are commentary on the corresponding chapter of AHH.





	1. DVD Extras: Chapter 1: "Patient to some degree"

**In which Irene Adler, inspired to visit the scene of a break-in by a boorish visitor from her past, intercepts an intriguing note; and John and Sherlock, en route to meet Sherlock’s estranged cousin Claudine, have a tryst on the Calais-Paris train.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on the very earliest phases of research and planning for this novel:

Penny was interested in background on the genesis and writing process of this project, so I’ve been trying to think about how it evolved into its current state. I remember that after I finished [The Violet Hour](https://archiveofourown.org/works/384405/chapters/629311) I was thinking about a sequel, and actually wrote [Ein Zimmer mit Bad](https://archiveofourown.org/works/487592) with only the vaguest notion what was going to happen in said sequel, to wit:

  * It would be set sometime in the early 20s, in Paris;
  * It would involve the American modernist expat community of the Left Bank: Stein, Hemingway, et al;
  * Music halls! Chase scenes! Light-hearted hijinx!
  * Sherlock had some kind of drug use in his past which might or might not be explored in it;
  * It would expand on John’s relationship with his ex-lover Daniel; and
  * It would involve a threat, but not a reality, of infidelity between Daniel and John.



So I’m batting about 3 for 6 on those assumptions by pure bullet-point count, and substantially less than that on the overall tone of the final novel as a whole. Welp!

I’m not sure of this, but I don’t _think_ I particularly planned on Irene being a character in that early version? Season 2 of Sherlock had just aired, and I really hated what the writers of the show did with Irene Adler, which made me want, in the abstract, to write corrective fic about her. But until I read holyfant’s (outstanding) [Photophobia](https://archiveofourown.org/works/541561), and had a bit of a conversation with holyfant in the comments on that story about Irene’s characterization, I couldn’t start to get purchase on how to write my own version of her. So I’m pretty sure my first vague conception of this novel was solely a Sherlock-and-John-centric one. Although Irene must have come along fairly soon, because my first posts tagged “The hour should be the evening and the season winter” (this is the projected final story in Irene’s Unreal Cities arc) were written five years ago, and by the time I was planning that story she had to have been an important character in this one. In the meantime, I spent the third quarter of 2012 writing [How the mouth changes its shape](https://archiveofourown.org/works/704773), so this whole nebulous TVH sequel project went on the back burner until that was done.

And then, in late 2012 when I started researching 1920s Paris… I think I had the thought, everyone in the US always talks about the expat community, but what about the actual French literary society during that time? One of the only points of contact between the two was that, for a brief period in the 1900s, the novelist Colette and her butch lover Mathilde de Morny, Marquise de Belboef (known as Missy) frequented the salon of American heiress and consummate sapphist Natalie Clifford Barney. I’d read quite a bit of Colette’s fiction, though it had been years. So I followed this research trail into Judith Thurman’s biography of her, which is chock full of SO MUCH GREAT MATERIAL that I was very quickly sold on the idea of adapting some of the real-life events and relationships into the scaffolding for the case in this story.

And actually, there were two periods of Colette’s life that I found absolutely riveting and ripe for fictional tinkering: there was this period during the decay of her second marriage, when her husband Henry Jouvenel was banging a Parisian fashion designer and she, at 48, was having an affair with her 17-year-old stepson—and that era coincided with the time period I was thinking about for the TVH sequel novel. But then there was this super-fascinating pre-war period, too, when she had just left her first husband, and she was destitute because he had basically stolen the rights to all the books she’d written, so she went on the music-hall stage to feed herself, and fell into the arms of Missy, and they had this very tender yet dominant/submissive-flavored relationship in which Missy took the role of the stone mother figure to Colette’s demanding child in need of care-taking and discipline. And—I guess by this point I must have already had in mind an important role for Irene Adler in “the Paris story,” because this era of Colette’s life started to slot incredibly usefully into an idea about Irene’s backstory and her coming-of-age as a young runaway from London—which is how I got blindsided by [Chez les bêtes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/863164) and spent a few months writing about Irene imprinting on a tyrannical yet sexually compelling Colette while finding herself as a pickpocketing baby-queer sadist in 1908 Le Havre. This actually did a _ton_ of work solidifying Irene’s characterization for _A hundred hours_ ; it was definitely a watershed in my understanding of (my) Irene as a person, so that once I was writing her in _A hundred hours_ her perpetual restless discontent, obsession with control and mother-figures, and compulsive sexual leveraging and conception of herself as always onstage, just carried her forward. Almost all of that stuff is at least hinted at from the get-go, even in Chapter 1 of _A hundred hours_ , and that definitely wouldn’t have come as naturally or quickly if I hadn’t written “Chez les bêtes.”

Next time: the origins of (my version of) Claudine Holmès, and as much as I can remember about my original thoughts on John’s ex-lover Daniel MacIntyre.


	2. DVD extras: Chapter 2: Hints of earlier and other creation

**In which Sherlock’s once-favorite cousin, Claudine, takes her English visitors to a bistro where she explains her reasons for summoning them to Paris—a series of break-ins at the offices of her friends, the self-involved and police-averse Jouvenels—and where the trio runs into someone John had thought never to see again. Meanwhile Irene, dropping in across town at the Hotel Vernet, impersonates a Jouvenel relative in order to intercept a parcel left there for Colette by parties unknown—with whose contents, it turns out, Irene is intimately familiar.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on the development of Claudine Holmès:

 

When I was reading about the era of Colette’s life that I used in [Chez les bêtes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/863164)—the dance-hall and lesbian demi-monde of 1908 and thereabouts—I came upon a passage about the composer Augusta Holmès, and had the following conversation with [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) (this was May of 2013, before I’d started outlining the novel):

> **hbbo, copy/pasting:** “There were discreet parties in Neuilly to which the guests wore “long trousers and tuxedos and behaved"—though not always "with unsurpassed propriety.” There were homely dinners in the smoky lesbian bistros of Montmartre, where an Algerian proprietress stood guard at a door with no sign above it. There were clubs whose specialties were fondue and dancing, and cabarets where the blue haze of cigar smoke hung over a zinc bar, and a contralto with a faint mustache sang Augusta Holmes.  
>  **hbbo:** In addition to that being generally delightful, I have never heard of Augusta Holmes!  
>  **gins:** me neither!!  
>  **hbbo:** she was apparently a French-Irish composer  
>  **hbbo:** that’s kind of intriguing  
>  **gins:** yes  
>  **hbbo:** “Camille Saint-Saëns wrote of Holmès in the journal Harmonie et Mélodie, "Like children, women have no idea of obstacles, and their willpower breaks all barriers. Mademoiselle Holmès is a woman, an extremist.”  
>  **gins:** this lady is  
>  **gins:** really interesting  
>  **hbbo:** Holmes?  
>  **gins:** mhm  
>  **hbbo:** yeah, for real  
>  **hbbo:** oh delightful, french wikipedia has her kids’ names & birthdates  
>  **gins:** you know  
>  **gins:** she’s about the right age to be your sherlock’s french grandmother—awfully young to be acd sherlock’s french grandmother  
>  **hbbo:** she is indeed!

One of those children listed in that French Wiki page was a Claudine: daughter of Holmès and her long-time unmarried partner, the poet Catulle Mendes. This caught my eye because Claudine is also the name of one of Colette’s most famous protagonists. What I knew about the plot of _A hundred hours_ at this point was basically, I think: a nascent backstory for Irene Adler, who would be a sympathetic antagonist; the idea that the structuring case element would involve Colette, specifically the period in her life when she was married to Henry Jouvenel and sleeping with his son Bertrand Jouvenel; that there would be some kind of reckoning between John and Daniel; and that Sherlock would have his own reasons that returning to France would be anxiety-inducing.

So when this historical person fell into my lap—Claudine Holmès, daughter of composer Augusta Holmès—I started playing with the idea of (a) a connection between this Claudine and the Claudine of Colette’s early novels, and (b) a family connection between the Continental branch of the Holm(è)s family, and the English branch, to which Sherlock belonged. Greywash and I spent a long time, over actually several years, revising exactly how the the Holm(è)s family tree works in this universe, but pretty early on we arrived at the idea of Claudine as Sherlock’s significantly older cousin, who took him under her wing at an impressionable age. This seemed to fit particularly well because the historical Claudine was, like Sherlock, a violinist—or at least, she was [painted by Auguste Renoir](https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/438014) holding a violin at the age of twelve. 

The idea began to suggest itself that Sherlock might have imprinted on Claudine at a young age, perhaps even hero-worshipped her a bit, and then for whatever reason cut off contact on leaving France. The historical Augusta Holmès turned out to have died in January of 1903, at which time this Sherlock would have been 11 years old, and Claudine 26. It would make sense, I thought, to have the English branch of the family come over to pay their last respects, even if they weren’t close to the French branch; and so Sherlock’s traumatic childhood trip to France was fixed in time, and I started building out from that scaffolding.

There were also some intensely delightful historical gifts that fell into my lap while I was working on Claudine’s own backstory and her connection to Colette—primary among them that the great friend of Colette’s youth, Marguerite Moreno, an actress often touted as the next Sarah Bernhardt, was, historically, the woman for whom Catulle Mendès left Augusta Holmès. So there was actually a historical link between Colette and Claudine, and Claudine and the Paris theatre world. The fact that there was also, in the theatrical piece “La Chair,” which Colette toured behind in 1908, a part for a cross-dressing female violinist, was more icing on the cake; and all this helped me to clarify an image of Claudine Holmès, sapphist and boulevardienne violinist, whose thriving young adulthood Sherlock glimpses in 1903 and who, by 1921, in solid middle age, knows everyone who is everyone in the Paris theater world and is almost a neighborhood institution in Montmartre. It also helped—and was great fun—to write an intermediate, 32-year-old version of Claudine through the eyes of an impressionable young Irene, in “Chez les bêtes,” even if Irene at the time is largely distracted by Colette. 

It’s strange to think that Claudine’s inclusion in this universe was such a product of research-related happenstance, because she was one of my favorite characters to write almost from the beginning—partially because a lot of her mannerisms are borrowed from a friend of mine I haven’t seen in a while (she lives in Toulouse, and to an extent my ex “got her” in the divorce), so I felt a little bit like I was spending time with her while I was writing Claudine. But I also really enjoyed writing lots of aspects of her relationship with Sherlock, both in 1903 and in 1921: the slippery nature of their estrangement; her heartiness and vulnerability; his simultaneous reluctance to be drawn back into her orbit and also unquestioning allegiance to her when she asks for help; their recognition of each other—for reasons relating to family history, queerness, and shared memories of a brief but intense period of time shared in 1903—as the same tribe. 

Next time: Researching the house-party from hell for Chapter 3.


	3. DVD Extras: Chapter 3: The menace and caress

**In which Irene, on the trail of her photographs, travels to Brittany in order to break into the Jouvenel summer house, Roz Ven—making her escape just in time to watch from a safe distance the arrival of John, Sherlock, Claudine, and the assorted Jouvenel entourage. Claudine introduces her cousin to the residents of Roz Ven, none of whom are remotely interested in his investigation; and some of whom, for reasons of his own, he finds deeply disquieting.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on researching the house party from hell, and how deciding to use Roz Ven as an organizing principle allowed the story outline to really start to gel (mildly spoiler-y for future, already-published chapters):

The case-related aspect of this novel, which structures the first twelve chapters, and is resolved in the last three, really grew out of reading the section of Judith Thurman’s _Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette_ that dealt with the summer of 1921, when a hopelessly entangled group of people gathered at Roz Ven, the house Missy had bought for Colette years before. Regular readers know I have a weakness for awkward historical (and fictional) dinner parties, and this entire summer at Roz Ven was one extremely awkward and extremely drawn-out social engagement. 

The cast list reads like an X-rated pastiche of an Agatha Christie novel—which, given that I was already playing with the tropes of detective fiction, seemed like a fun thing to make use of. Historically, you’ve got the successful female novelist with her coterie of secretaries, lovers, and hangers-on; but in this version she is having an affair with her teenaged step-son (who was offered to her by his own mother basically as a bribe for socially-motivated intercession with their mutual husband). You’ve got the cheating husband who has lost interest in his ageing wife, and openly brings his mistress to summer with them—only in this version, the wife is also sleeping with the mistress, during breaks from the step-son. You’ve got one secretary who’s madly in love with a novelist hanger-on, who in turn is both married and totally uninterested in both women, and indeed anything except the avant-garde literary scene. You have a secretary to the novelist who is the daughter of her late best friend, and who has also slept with her husband (though not enjoyed it much). You’ve got a former mistress of the husband, a literal decaying Countess whom everyone calls “The Panther,” living in an outbuilding on the property while she slowly goes deaf and blind at the bizarrely un-advanced age of 56. It doesn’t get much soapier or more salacious than this.

I was so captivated by reading this section of Thurman’s book that I started revising my conception of the organization of _A hundred hours_ , so that a large part of the first half of it takes place in Brittany instead of Paris. This created some issues that were at first challenges but soon became useful organizing principles: I knew, for example, that an interaction between John and Daniel (without Sherlock) would be the sort of central event of the story, and I knew that Daniel was living and working as an artist in Paris. If John and Sherlock had both been together in Paris the whole time, there would have been other ways to separate them for short stretches but it would have been more difficult to create the kind of long, unstructured/unscheduled/un-Sherlocked and also unexpected period of time that John ends up with in Chapter 13—while also being much more difficult to control/limit Sherlock’s flow of information about how John spends that time, after the fact. (It also would have been EVEN MORE DIFFICULT to wrangle John’s headspace if there had been somewhere he was supposed to be later that evening, and believe me, it was difficult enough as it was. I probably never would have finished Chapter 13.) But if they’re out in the country and Sherlock, for case-related reasons, sends John back to Paris for a day or two, it’s suddenly much easier to orchestrate a night where John is at loose ends; and also a lot easier to limit Sherlock’s sources of intelligence about that night. 

I feel like, for a lot of reasons, it was deciding on the structural element of the house party that allowed many aspects of the story to start to gel. The stay at Roz Ven provided me with a city vs. country tension which was useful not just for Sherlock/John/Daniel logistics but also for the exploration of Irene’s mental space throughout the novel. She grew up in (the slums of) one world capital and has spent the last 13 years making a legend of herself in a different world capital; she self-identifies hugely with the city to the point of finding even a visit to the provinces very destabilizing, dangerous, even ominous. But at the same time, having arrived at the top of her industry she’s become super, super bored with her Paris life, and is already planning to leave on a sort of world tour before moving back to London (I knew this about her very early in the planning process). The provinces are something new, and they allow her to put on different types of disguises and personae, and she is (always, and especially at this moment) hungry for novelty and for self-reinvention. So the countryside is uncomfortable for her, but in a stimulating way, which was very useful. And the fact that going there in the first place means confronting this woman (Colette) about whom she has formative and obsessive thoughts/memories/attitudes, means there’s a cool tension between old and new for her, as well. 

The focus on the group at Roz Ven also gave me my main antagonist in the form of Charles Humbert, real-life journalistic rival of Henry Jouvenel, who had served a parallel post to Jouvenel’s during the War, and owned the conservative counterpart to Jouvenel’s centrist-liberal newspaper, and had once, in real life, fought a duel with Jouvenel at sunrise. (Really.) The two men had enough of a long-term mutual (hostile) obsession that it might suggest erotic undertones even to a non-fandom eye; it certainly did to mine. Once I’d decided to use the Jouvenels and their Roz Ven house party as an organizing principle, Humbert clicked into place as a thorn in their sides. At which point the idea for this story’s Maguffin—the photographs which both Humbert and Irene are chasing—was suggested by a combination of Irene Adler’s canonical photographs in both “A Scandal in Bohemia” and the BBC take on it, “A Scandal in Belgravia”; the Humbert/Jouvenel animosity, and Irene’s current status as the star courtesan at Paris’s swankiest brothel—a status, it occurred to me, that she probably used the War to cement. If Humbert, Jouvenel, and Irene had met at her place of work during the war, and something happened and was documented there, it made sense that the resulting photographs would be something neither man would want the other to get hold of. It took a while longer to come up with a reason Irene herself would much care about getting ahold of them, but I got there in the end. 

Long story short, once I decided to make use of the Roz Ven house party, I suddenly had a much larger percentage of the structure and plot of the novel—not to mention a larger number of the characters—than I had before.

Next week: Writing a porn fugue, AKA upping narrative tension with sex.


	4. DVD Extras: Chapter 4: The sea howl, and the sea yelp

**In which John and Sherlock, frustrated in their investigations and ill at ease with their prickly hosts and their own memories, go out for cider and a fish dinner… and then adjourn to the back lane. Meanwhile Irene, unsettled by her sighting of the Jouvenel family, makes the acquaintance (ahem) of an awkward, frumpily-dressed young woman with striking eyes and an intriguing relationship to Colette.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on upping the narrative tension via 11,000 words of parallel sex scenes:

At one point I thought that Chapter 4 was going to be the most difficult of the whole novel. 

I would just like to take a moment to laugh about that now. Can you believe my optimism?!

As mentioned yesterday, this chapter was affectionately referred to during composition as “the porn fugue,” for obvious reasons. When I was moving index cards around on my wall, playing with how to juxtapose Irene’s and Sherlock’s arcs in Part 1, I originally had a sort of “oh crap” moment when I ended up with back-to-back intense sex scenes in a single chapter, because I do usually try to be intentional about spacing them out. But once I started thinking about it, I sort of liked the parallelism that back-to-back placement establishes between Sherlock and Irene. 

The Sherlock/John scene is obviously an extension of an already-established relationship, while the Irene/Germaine one is an opportunistic (Irene thinks) one-night stand with ulterior motives, but in both cases the POV character is both struggling with and trying to repress desires, anxieties and memories that they’re markedly not sharing with their partner; and in both cases the partner has their own set of vested interests that they’re not sharing with the POV character. That echo seemed like it could be productive—particularly since I knew that Irene and Sherlock were slated to have a pretty lengthy showdown in a few chapters. The things that each of them are insisting to themselves, inside their own heads, might be to a certain extent opposite one another (the desire for autonomy versus the desire for closeness, for example), but the way they’re insisting them, as if they could make these things true almost by force of will, are quite similar. 

There’s also a shared element of imagination, of Sherlock and Irene both as creators of frameworks that, while they’re known to be fiction, also have the potential to be fact. Sherlock is trying to imagine himself into the knowledge of John and Daniel’s shared experience. He has nascent anxieties about this realm of experience that John and Daniel share but that he, Sherlock, doesn’t; and he’s trying to conjure himself into empathy, not just with the experience of life on the battlefield in general, but with how the dynamic must have worked between the much-older John and the much-younger Daniel. He’s trying to conjure himself into the role of Daniel, so that he can understand; and at the same time, because imagining himself out of the picture entirely makes him feel far removed from John, he is trying to imaginatively superimpose that “understanding” that he is creating for himself, on top of the best parts of the preexisting dynamic between himself and John, that makes him feel closeness between them. Even apart from the certain set of his own childhood memories that he’s simultaneously trying not to think about, that’s a lot of imaginative work to be doing mid-blowjob. It’s almost more than he effectively can do, but showing him trying is important, I think, for what comes later in Chapters 18 and 20: this imaginative exercise in empathy-building is not only important to him—and by this point almost a reflex with him—but also tied to his professional self-image such that when it fails, it threatens his ability to relate to himself. 

Meanwhile Irene is imaginatively constructing a mental image of Germaine based on her (as it turns out somewhat misleading) self-presentation, but also based on Germaine’s connection with Colette, filtered through the lens of Irene’s own past association and ongoing grudging preoccupation with Colette. There’s a kind of triangulation of pseudo-maternalism and power play going on:

  * Germaine tells her that Colette is her employer but really “more like a mother to me”; 
  * Irene first knew and imprinted on the domineering Colette when Irene, in her teens, was searching for role models in the wake of running away from her own mother’s home; 
  * (Irene then witnessed Colette being dominated by Missy, who liked to role-play a sexualized maternalism toward her lover, though this part is in [Chez les bêtes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/863164) and not spelled out in AHH); 
  * on top of which Germaine is presenting herself here as a neophyte to woman/woman sex; 
  * and the very shape of Germaine’s body and the clothes she is wearing remind Irene of a more youthful, innocent, pre-War world. 



  
All these factors combine so that Irene, who generally approaches sex by reading the other person and playing to what they want, has a hard time getting a read on Germaine because there are things about her that cause interference by bringing to the fore things Irene herself wants, and also things that baffle and frighten her; and a lot of those are tied up with mother/daughter dynamics. Germaine has a mother-like relationship to Colette—something Irene not only never managed access to but feels she was denied—but what does that mean? What does it look like? A mother, she thinks, is someone who dominates you, who demands things of you, who prevents you from getting what you want or being who you are; well, Irene is wired to perceive relationships as power struggles, and she is very comfortable in, and under the right circumstances aroused by being in, a dominating role. It’s especially arousing to think about thoroughly dominating Germaine, because to do so would be, in some way, to put one over on Colette. But this kind of mothering is what Germaine has just been saying makes her unhappy about her relationship with Colette. Isn’t a mother, Irene wonders, also someone who nurtures and takes care of you; who is gentle with you; who introduces you gradually to new things? But this part both comes less naturally to Irene, and also taps into her feelings of guilt about being unable to make herself stay in London and live the life that her own mother wanted for her. All of this mother-obsession is key to Irene’s character development (and this first night between Irene and Germaine sows important plot stuff for later on), but I also ended up really liking it right next to Sherlock’s semi-repressed childhood anxieties, for reasons that… will become clear later on.

Anyway! That’s how the porn fugue came about. (As a side note: with foreknowledge of 11-12, it cracks me up to imagine what’s going on in Germaine Beaumont’s head during this scene.)

Next time: notes on condensing Chapters 5 & 6 from the original outline, and the unexpected aspects of writing from an outsider perspective.

> **pennypaperbrain asked:** So after reading the whole work, I came to the conclusion that sex scenes running parallel with sex scenes and overprinted on other sex scenes was actually a core hbbo signature element. Does this mean it came to be by accident?

Well, not exactly… There were certainly parallels that were built in from very early on. Irene’s two very different narrations of the same wartime foursome, for example (though these happen four chapters apart). Also the scenes you asked about in a previous conversation, where a sex scene in the present is complicated and made more miserable by being overlaid on top of memories of past or imagined sex scenes (btw, that technique is the subject for the DVD notes on Chapter 8, so keep an eye out). Those two were intentional for sure.

But usually, when I’m working with multiple alternating character arcs that are push-pulling against each other and acting as counterbalances for each other, like Irene and Sherlock do throughout Part 1 and John and Sherlock do throughout Part 2, I try to have their emotional trajectories more staggered than synchronized. Like, if they’re like this it’s probably too pat:

But that is generally much better, or at least closer to what I’m looking for, than this:

I don’t want high points to coincide with high points and low points with low points; I want them to pull against each other and create productive friction (… so to speak). I was concerned that having that first Irene/Germaine scene backed right up against the distraught John/Sherlock alley scene would be too much like lining up their sine waves so that they just echoed each other, rather than speaking to each other or balancing one another. But I think it ended up being more like this:

Where even though there are two peaks (again: LOL) close together, the amplitude of the two waves is different enough that the two trajectories still end up in productive tension/conversation at plenty of other points.

> **pennypaperbrain replied:** At the points where peaks/troughs do more or less coincide I was put in mind of the destabilising effect of heavy weights lurching to one side or the other. This produces an impetus - an art - all of its own, and felt like it had a squaring effect on the power of the scene (I just summoned Ponder to read this post and he predictably denounced artistic abuse of maths, but that is by the by).

LOL, that’s okay. It’s possible Gins was mildly horrified by the misuse of math, as well.

But thanks for that lovely heavy shifting weights image. Or, I guess it’s more of a bodily sensation—a great one. The feeling of being constantly off-balance but in changing, unpredictable ways was definitely something I struggled to explore & expand into.


	5. DVD Extras: Chapter 5: Their faces relax from grief into relief

**In which Irene, unseen, observes a luncheon at Roz Ven while contemplating her morning-after with Germaine, her shared past with Claudine and Colette, and the identities of the spies who followed her here from Paris. Meanwhile, down at the luncheon table, amidst memories of the War, news arrives from Paris of another break-in at the home of Monsieur Jouvenel’s ex-wife, and Sherlock is reluctantly persuaded to send John to investigate.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on the unexpected benefits of early structural changes to Chapters 5 and 6:

In my original outline for _A hundred hours_ , there were (IIRC) 27 chapters, and every chapter in Part 1 stuck to the same two-part structure, alternating Irene POV/Sherlock POV in one chapter with Sherlock POV/Irene POV in the next. When I started writing Chapter 5, though, I realized that this would mean following the 11,000-word Chapter 4 with quite a few chapters of only 1,000 to 3,000 words each. I’m not overly finicky about keeping consistent chapter lengths—sometimes I think mixing it up can cause the shorter chapters to pack more of a punch, Vonnegut-style; and sometimes a really long chapter in the midst of shorter ones can also do important narrative work. In this case, though, it didn’t seem like it was going to be effective. [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) had the idea of condensing those small, moving-the-action-along pieces into two larger chapters that would switch POV more frequently but still preserve the Irene, Sherlock, Sherlock, Irene pattern, which is how I came out with a final chapter count of 24.

And actually, I ended up really liking what this condensing does for both chapters it affected. In Chapter 5, it creates a feeling of rapid, multi-directional bustle and motion that I think works well with all of the interpersonal dynamics going on at the brunch table. Sherlock is at first watching the action from relatively close by (the upper-floor window of Roz Ven) and is later in the midst of the action; whereas Irene is watching the same scene from a larger remove and without the knowledge of the participants; and while I didn’t anticipate it, this juxtaposition ended up giving a nice mixture of (the equivalent of) tight camera shots and wider landscape-style views. Since both Sherlock and Irene are so preoccupied with their own concerns, it was also useful to have two rapidly-alternating perspectives on the same scene, since the two of them fixate on very different things, and when they do notice the same things have different takes on them. I feel like it’s often a challenge to replicate in prose, especially with a tight POV character, that Robert Altman-esque filmic quality of an ensemble scene with a large cast and lots of side-interactions happening on top of, and overlapping with, each other—the pan-in-pan-out effect in Ch5 doesn’t completely get it either, but it gives enough of a sense that I’d like to play with a similar trick in future projects, maybe push it further and see what happens. 

(I also like that, for both Sherlock and Irene, when they look at the luncheon going on the past is almost intrusively present for them; but for Sherlock it’s more of an anxiety-inducing question mark, a reminder of transformations he was absent for; whereas for Irene it’s more along the lines of “Ohhhh _these_ assholes again.” Story of her life in Paris, at this point. “I thought I was done with this jerk but apparently I’m not”: a memoir by Irene Adler.)

In Chapter 6, the POV alternations slow down: it’s the equivalent of two chapters rather than Chapter 5′s three. Here I was always delighted by the idea of juxtaposing two scenes in which Sherlock and Irene both wandered around Roz Ven at night, overhearing some of the same things while they draw closer and closer, in the end barely avoiding bumping into one another. And I still get a kick out of that drawing-together, especially in light of the Sherlock-Irene catfight/pissing match that is coming up in Chapters 7 & 8\. By 6 they’re on a collision course, although the collision doesn’t quite happen yet. But I I also ended up liking the way the second set of scenes makes the chapter balloon back out, to show their subsequent separation. I like the sense that they’re simultaneously being pulled into each others’ orbits, and also being tugged back toward, respectively, Paris and John. 

Next time: speculations on why Chapter 6 ended up being the chapter in Part 1 that was most revised during my final big editing pass through the entire book.


	6. DVD Extras: Chapter 6: Different voices, often together heard

**In which Sherlock and Irene both spend the night creeping around Roz Ven, pursuing their own ends and eavesdropping on the amours of the inhabitants. The morning after, Irene speaks gleefully with her Paris contact about the tail she’d had placed on the man she now knows to be John Watson; and Sherlock takes an unsettling telephone call from John at his hotel.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on the final, multi-arc editing pass on the entire book, and why, during that pass, the relatively short and plotty 6 ended up being the most-revised chapter of Part 1:

My writing-then-editing process on A hundred hours, especially once I started working on Part 2, went as follows:

  * From the full book outline, flesh out the outline of the individual chapter 
  * Draft the chapter from the outline 
  * Revise the chapter draft on my own
  * When the chapter draft was as good as I could get it, ask for high-level feedback from [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) ("Gins")
  * Revise the chapter according to Gins’s feedback
  * (Repeat last two steps as necessary, in the case of Ch13 for a literal year)
  * When both Gins and I were satisfied as to a chapter’s basic solidity, move on to drafting the next chapter in the mini-arc
  * When all chapters in a mini-arc were drafted, go back and revise the entire arc on my own, paying attention to emotional/mental character trajectories and consistency
  * Get Gins’s feedback on the entire mini-arc
  * Revise the entire mini-arc again based on Gins’s feedback
  * When the entire mini-arc was basically sound, move onto the next mini-arc
  * When all mini-arcs were basically sound, read through the entire novel and revise for highest-level character trajectories and thematic arcs
  * Get Gins’s feedback on the entire novel, with an eye to those same kinds of issues
  * **Revise the entire novel based on Gins’s feedback**



  
  
During this last step, the one in bold, I went back and revised Part 1 was well, even though it was already posted, because by that point my desire to have a narrative object that held together as best it could, trumped my embarrassment at having inadvertently shown people an unfinished version four years ago. For the most part these revisions were pretty small, with only a few substantive rewritings here and there. Where the substantive edits happened, they were on scenes that played into a few large arcs I was revising for all the way through the book: these included (but weren’t limited to): solidifying the Sherlock-Claudine relationship; John’s mental trajectory once he gets to Paris; John’s relationship to the concepts of contagion and responsibility and Sherlock’s perception of that relationship; and, more cosmetically, the rendering of French in the book. 

That final editing pass was really interesting, because I feel like it made patterns and, um—narrative jet streams, I suppose, visible where I wasn’t previously conscious of them. In other words, there are all these arcs, which surface in the narrative at different times, in making notes to myself about where I had to revise I would note down, say, Arc A needs revision in Chapters 2, 3, 6, 9, 10, 18, 21, 22, 24; and Arc B needs revision in 6, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, and Arc C needs revision in 1, 5, 6, 15, 17, 21, and so on for all the eight or so arcs I was paying attention to. And just in listing out those surfacing points, I became aware that there were certain “node” chapters where ALL the arcs—or at least, all the arcs in need of revision—came together. Chapter 21 is, for various reasons, an obvious example of this; it’s a resolution-y chapter in a lot of quite blatant ways, so it’s not surprising that many threads come together there. But I was surprised to find that Chapter 6 is also a node chapter, because I hadn’t thought of it as a very central of pivotal part of the story. 

I’m not really sure what larger lessons, if any, to draw from this little inadvertent mapping exercise. Chapter 6 has Sherlock, while spooking around Roz Ven, reflecting on his interaction with Claudine earlier in the day, when she spoke to him about John—so that little mental recall scene required revision from both the Sherlock-Claudine angle and the Sherlock’s-perception-of-John’s-mental-state angle. And then the telephone conversation between John and Sherlock came in for pretty significant revision in order to bring it in line with a later version of the same conversation, which I also revised as part of the John’s-mental-state-in-Paris arc. Maybe it’s just coincidence that multiple arcs-to-revise happened to coincide here; I’m not sure. After all, there were additional arcs the didn’t need revision on the final pass, and those didn’t end up “mapped”; I’m positive there are other ways of visualizing the trajectory of the book that would make different chapters stick out and let Chapter 6 fade back into the woodwork. I keep trying to think of factors shared between the remembered-interaction-with-Claudine scene and the telephone call with John scene, but everything that occurs to me—characters coming into conflict with their own mental/emotional versions of each other; places where backstory surfaces to haunt the present; scenes that foreshadow or connect up with future revelations—could equally well be applied to almost every scene in the novel. 

Maybe the mechanism at work is more just a reflection of the way in which both characters and concepts tend to form little unit-groups, where when one comes up the others will probably follow. In Sherlock’s POV, there are reasons to connect his cousin Claudine with anxieties about self-knowledge and fidelity; and his other obvious reasons for dwelling on those things at the moment have to do with John: there’s a way in which you can’t really disentangle a single thread from the whole self-knowledge-and-fidelity knot. And whenever you have a scene told once from one perspective and then, much later, again from a different perspective, I suppose it’s unsurprising that both versions would call for some revision.

Still, it was an interesting exercise for the way it made me conscious of currents and parallels I hadn’t previously been aware of, in this novel which, by the time of this final revision, I felt I knew absolutely backward and forward. 

Next time: Musings on Irene’s relationship to sexuality, and how utterly delightful I found writing Irene and Sherlock as bantering allitagonists/frenemies.


	7. DVD Extras: Chapter 7: The sea's lips, or in the dark throat

**In which Sherlock hunts down the Roz Ven housebreaker at her St. Malo hotel, and finds her possessed of not only his name and his business, but also shocking claims about the night John spent in Paris. Irene, for her part, is wrong-footed to find that the spy Holmes knows nothing about her photographs, Charles Humbert, or even, until she tells him it, her name—and if neither Charles nor Henry hired him, then who did?**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on Irene’s relationship to sexuality and my desire for an entire novel of Sherlock/Irene frenemy banter:

I really loved writing Sherlock and Irene’s interactions. My adoration of their animosity cum frenemy-ship really took me by surprise, actually, and it’s to some degree altered my thinking about the final (I think?) story in Irene’s arc in this universe, which is still very much in planning phases and will take place in 1926. Or mayyyybe even another, intermediate story between this one and that one, which would focus on 1923ish, ~~though I’m resistant to that idea because I would theoretically like to be done with this universe at some distant point~~.

In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed writing this chapter and the next one. It felt like one of those moments of payoff, when a bunch of effort that may have felt like a distraction or a dead end at the time, turns out instead to have been preparation for a future moment, and that moment has come. In this case, that distraction was [Chez les bêtes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/863164), which _did_ very much feel like a tangent when it sprang itself upon me during _A hundred hours_ research; writing 13,000 words of Irene backstory was in no way part of the original plan. But it turned out to be _incredibly_ helpful, for Irene’s depiction in this novel as a whole but in particular for these two chapters, because it made me feel like Irene and Sherlock were both coming to the page with a similar level of fleshed-out-ness, of internal strengths and neuroses and weak spots and compulsions. And because of that I had so much less work to do, once I got to this point, in terms of crafting characterization: I could just let them loose at each other and enjoy the sparks. 

A huge part of the work that Chez les bêtes does is to explore the way Irene, as a result of her class and her gender, is relentlessly sexualized from a very young age by basically everyone around her, even those who have her best interests at heart. It’s true of, for example, the middle-class busybody ~activists~ who spy on her and her friends as children, while they’re playing in the park, and gossip about how people of her class have sex with their siblings (for more on the prurient middle- and upper-class sexualization of the lower classes in Victorian England, check out Françoise Barret-Ducrocq’s _Love in the Time of Victoria_ , and prepare to be grossed out) and it’s true of the men who patronize the bar where Irene works as a teenager. But it’s also true of her suitor cum fiancé, and even of her own mother: because Irene is a very beautiful girl, she has a point of leverage to lift herself out of penury by marrying up; to want that for her daughter isn’t unreasonable of Florence, even if the life of middle-class domesticity she’s offered isn’t something to which Irene can ultimately reconcile herself. What she wants, and ultimately pursues, is a more radical freedom, and by her own lights she has to be pretty cutthroat to get it. All of which emotional/character précis is to say: it was tremendously useful to have explored that early grounding in society’s compulsive sexualization of this character, and her early relationship to, and coopting of, that sexualization, and what a wrenching struggle that was for her at sixteen, because it left me free to do other work with 30-year-old Irene in this _A hundred hours_. 

Because at this point it’s no longer a struggle for her to navigate society’s sexualization of her, or her own desire for autonomy and power: if anything, those things have become such common fixtures of her universe that she is simultaneously blind to them because so accustomed, and also bored by them without totally realizing what it is that’s boring her. Sexual appeal and sexualized behavior are at this point her default method for interacting with other people, to the point of compulsion (something that’s obviously true of the show version of this character, too), but I think it would have been difficult to understand her evolving relationship to those behaviors, at age 30, without writing her at nine through sixteen; because there are ways in which our former selves become invisible or at least camouflaged to us as we get older. Irene at 30 has achieved mastery in a style of relating by which Irene at thirteen felt intrigued yet overwhelmed; and it’s not that she doesn’t remember feeling that, but she doesn’t spend much time analyzing the social forces that more or less forced her into fluency in it. 

The same goes for her relationship to power: because she had to push for her own autonomy, even against people who loved her, she’s come to take it for granted that every human relationship is a power struggle. For Irene at 30 that’s just a given, and she spends basically zero conscious thought questioning it; which means that if I hadn’t spent that time with her younger self in preparation, it would have been extremely difficult for me to understand where she is coming from since she doesn’t really understand that, either.

I wrote another 600ish words about where Irene’s arc is headed, but I think I’ll save it for Chapter 12. In the meantime, stay tuned next week for a DVD extras request on the construction of miserable, haunted sex scenes. (Fun!)


	8. DVD Extras: Chapter 8: Useful, untrustworthy

**In which Sherlock trades barbs with his new acquaintance, and Irene tells him a bedtime story—calibrated to his particular interests—about her work during the War. Later, Sherlock goes for a swim, pets a cat, and chats with Colette about sexual mores either side of the Channel.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on the subject of (by request from @pennypaperbrain):

> your signature technique of having a quite miserable/fucked-up sex scene in the past that is then overlaid on the present to create a REALLY miserable/fucked-up scene. This is intriguing and complex, and probably needs a technical name.

  
“A ghost in the fucking machine,” perhaps.

This is indeed a pattern that crops up over & over in _A hundred hours_ : most notably in Chapter 13 (and to a lesser degree in the John POV chapters which follow that), and also in Sherlock POV in Chapter 14; there are even hints of it as early as Chapter 4. But this chapter is the first place it obviously comes up, I think, despite the fact that—well, it’s debatable the degree to which Sherlock and Irene are having a sexual encounter, here. But it’s certainly sexualized, because sex is Irene’s go-to tool for interpersonal interaction, and it’s certainly miserable, and it’s certainly more miserable because of the use Irene is making of the story she’s telling about the past. This makes sense, then, as a place to first bring it up.

So I think this kind of sex scene attracts me because it’s the confluence of quite a few of my narrative obsessions.

  * **People who are, in ways, very close, are in other ways still far apart (put another way: even though people are always far apart, they can sometimes approach surprisingly close).** I am pretty much always playing with this paradox of closeness and distance. Since individual memory and imagination are elements of human experience that aren’t ever fully communicable to another person, even if we try, I like to explore situations in which ostensible or attempted closeness (and sex is a classic human way to attempt closeness) is either undermined or in some way augmented by the memories or imaginings of one or both characters. I think I probably most concretely learned this from [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile)’s/@fizzygins’s [in deed accomplish our designs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/346149), which involves a lot of mutual verbal fantasizing about having a different kind of sex than the sex the characters are having. In that story this technique is generally a sexual plus rather than a minus (this ceases to be true in later Good Morrow stories, which have also been extremely influential for me despite not yet being published). But this kind of AHH scene is a logical outgrowth of that, just shifted to involve more misery and a greater obsession with the past. Speaking of:
  * **The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past:** I should probably tag 90% of my fiction with this Faulkner quote. But in this story in particular, even more than most of my stuff, all three of the main characters are viscerally haunted by their past traumas and relationships. There’s a mechanism in a lot of ghost stories where the haunting intensifies the closer the character gets to the source of the disturbance, whether that disturbance be genuinely supernatural, or psychological, or both. So for example, in _White is for Witching_ Miranda gets sucked deeper into the house/her disorder whenever she makes a gesture toward escaping or understanding it; in _Turn of the Screw_ the detrimental effects of the narrator’s spirit-perceptions increase as she tries to force other people into acknowledging the ghosts she’s seeing; in _The Little Stranger_ the negative consequences to the Ayreses intensify as Faraday’s involvement with the family, and attachment to the house, solidifies.  
  
I think there’s a way in which, in _A hundred hours_ , many of the sex scenes are points where the characters are forced closer to confrontation with their personal ghosts, and they’re experiencing that nonconsensual intensification of disturbance that happens when a haunted person approaches the source of their hauntedness but hasn’t yet made actual contact with it. So, when Irene is fucking Germaine Beaumont in her hotel room, she is drawing close to a complex of mother-related memory, guilt, and fear that she’s been semi-successfully repressing; and when Sherlock goes back to France and is confronted with sexual infidelity and people acting “out of character,” he is nearing a similarly tangled and semi-repressed set of memories; and John’s ghost is the most literal of them all, with Daniel seeming to him almost literally to come back from the dead. Writing those layers of ghost experience into sex scenes makes sense to me, because although rhetoric around “places where the veil is thin” turns out to be ahistorical Spiritualist nonsense when applied to actual religious beliefs and practices, it’s kind of an apt metaphor for the way in which allowing oneself to be with another person in a moment of intense desire—and allowing the presence of that desire to be transparent to the other person even if one isn’t up-front about its sources or subtleties—can erode the boundaries between self and not-self, now-self and then-self, interior-self and outward-facing-self, and let a bunch of other unexpected psychological baggage flood through those gaps. Similarly: 
  * **Sex tends toward altered consciousness.** This story in particular involves a lot of deep POV of altered states—characters narrating from inside places of fury, intoxication, exhaustion, grief, denial, and both inadvertent and willed dissociation. Sex tends to be another moment when sensation and perception are either heightened or just—shifted. Filters normally in place come down, but different filters (perhaps) go up. I suppose this is just another way of saying what I did above, about the veil growing thin between different versions of self. And lastly, the old chestnut:
  * **Memory and perception are shifting and unreliable.** Irene becomes the most conscious and controlled example of this, when she re-tells the story she just told Sherlock to Germaine Beaumont in Chapter 11 in a way that never factually contradicts the version she tells here, but which radically revises it from an emotional/motivational perspective. But in all cases where this ghost-in-the-fucking-machine technique comes into play, it does so because characters are either altering their perceptions of things they remember in the past in light of things that are happening in the present; or changing their perception of the present based on past events which are now obtruding themselves on their attention. This kind of ever-shifting hermeneutic circle, in which memories and interpretations of memories are never set but always in the process of revision based on new experiences (and vice versa) is probably my #1 narrative fascination. And since, in this story, so many of the characters’ formative memories are in some way sexualized, sexually-charged, or related to sexual relationships, sex scenes become a logical crucible for the messiest parts of that revision process to take place. 



  
  
I think this scene in Chapter 8 is a fitting sort of… intro level, I guess, to this kind of sex scene, because Irene here is consciously _trying_ to manipulate Sherlock with her use of the remembered sex in her story. Immediately after she’s just told Sherlock that John and Daniel—former lovers who served together in the War—went to a brothel specializing in pretty boys and catering to special tastes, she starts telling the story of this kinky brothel-housed foursome in a way that emphasizes the sexual tension between Henry and Charles, and paints that sexual tension as specifically a product of their shared military service—a military service Irene will know by now, having researched his background, that Sherlock did not share. She’s trying to destabilize him, because she’s trying to get a read on what he knows and what he’s up to; and she’s doing that by trying her best to hit all his buttons simultaneously: insecurity, arousal, fear, grief, jealousy. As an author—in addition to just finding it incredibly fun to watch Irene play her manipulation games—I like that kind of roiling emotion soup. I like writing situations where a character’s emotions are volatile, and not totally understood by them; or in which they are trying to repress something that’s going on inside them, because they don’t want to feel or understand it. Characters like Irene and Sherlock are particularly fertile in this way, I think, because they are both invested in the idea that they are special _due_ to their ability to keep excellent control over themselves at all times. 

That’s especially true later on, because in future scenes—certainly in 13/15 and 14, and in that scene in 12 when Sherlock is on the train—the role of provocateur that Irene is playing here, is internalized to the POV character. The thing tormenting them is either in their own memories or their own imagination—or usually some combination of the two, because imagination always plays a part in situating ourselves with relation to the past, and memory always informs our imaginings. In the cases of these later chapters there’s no conscious or malicious intent, like there is in this Chapter 8 scene, and no external motivation for the direction in which they’re being pushed. They’re carrying the ghost within themselves, which is in many (maybe all) ways more disturbing and difficult to deal with.

> **pennypaperbrain replied:** Thank you for digging into this. ‘roiling emotion soup’ sounds like a good pull-quote for the back of a print version of _A hundred hours_.
> 
> I don’t think I’ve really seen this technique elsewhere, which surprises me, given what fertile territory it is – but then any great creative move can look obvious in retrospect. It certainly fits with your ambition of exploring simultaneously intense and uncomfortable sex, in contrast to the mainstream literary accepted wisdom of it having to be either genre-romance flowery or Bad-Sex-Prize gauche. Apart from the internal influence of the mini post-Bloomsbury that is the hbbo/gins ménage, does it have specific influences? The constant reinterpretation of memories obviously reminds me of Woolf, but outside a sexual context. Are you lone-pioneering here?

  
LOL, yes, the whole thing is indeed 200K+ words of roiling emotion soup.

This is an interesting question, about influences… it’s true that so-called literary fiction doesn’t usually sexualize this technique as much as I do, but that’s kind of par for the fanfic course. (Not to say that all fanfic is sexual, but the medium certainly provides an open playground for explicit experimental sex-writing in a way that neither conventional romance nor literary fiction do.) 

But there are certainly, like… really all that’s going on is that we’re so deep into a character’s subjectivity at a moment when that subjectivity kind of warps and buckles, that it becomes really apparent the degree to which we can’t separate their embodied experience of reality, from reality. Which, right, is fairly painfully Woolfian; when Clarissa Dalloway “plunges” across Westminster intersections there is no reality of present-day Westminster in the narration that can be separated from her memories of Bourton, except insofar as the present day contrasts with it:

> What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning…

  
I mean, the past is more present to her than the present! She goes on about Bourton for another full paragraph before she even registers the fact that she is currently standing on a kerb waiting to cross the street; and even then, she only surfaces for a moment. It’s as if her memories of Bourton are a very thick yet permeable membrane through which she’s perceiving everything in front of her; and that’s something that a scene like the alley one in Chapter 4 of AHH, or a lot of the sex scenes in Part 2, adapts wholesale.

Another person who is obviously obsessed with this past/present concatenation is Proust—and there’s plenty of sex in Proust, though there’s less direct in-the-midst-of-sex subjectivity and more, like, worrying about the past alone in a flowerbed while spying on the neighbors fucking. That said, Chapters 12 and 14 and Sherlock’s early Part 2 arc generally do owe a debt to Marcel’s obsessive fretting-cum-fantasizing about Albertine’s suspected lesbianism. 

And then, once we get to Chapter 13 the whole last third of it owes a lot to the Circe/Nighttown episode of Joyce’s _Ulysses_ … I think this was more blatantly clear in some of the earlier versions of that chapter, which @greywash and I will probably talk about when I publish 13. (TL;DR: there were MANY of them, and a lot of them involved much more of a haze of drunkenness than the final version.) But that’s certainly an explicitly sexual example of that journey-into-the-debauched-underworld vibe, what with Bello/Bella’s and Bloom’s gender transformations, and the hallucinations of ejaculating hanged men and trials for sexual deviance, and so on, which all let Bloom’s guilt and subjectivity—which draw directly on his past—do that warping-and-buckling thing to his (and our) perceptions of the reality around him.

A more modern person who does this in a much more understated way than Joyce (not a high bar) is Emma Donoghue, in _hood_ : since that novel opens with Cara’s death, all the sex scenes between her and Pen are (a) remembered, and (b) processed through the filter of Pen’s grief; and although there’s no instance in that book where Pen is remembering Cara while having sex with someone else, there are plenty of instances where those memories are layered on top of her current surroundings in a way that makes both layers more poignant. 

Now I’ve been conceited enough and have to dash to work! But thanks for the follow-up ask. :-) 

(And in general, if folks have questions/suggestions for discussion topics in these notes sections of A hundred hours, lay ‘em on me.)


	9. DVD Extras: Chapter 9: A problem confronting the builder of bridges

**In which Claudine attempts to feed a waterlogged and salt-encrusted Sherlock, and also to give him some insight into her loyalty to Colette—a loyalty to which, she thinks, Sherlock might relate due to their shared experiences in 1903. Meanwhile, Irene follows the Roz Ven gang to a provincial production of A Doll’s House, and provokes Madame Carco into some useful disclosures.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on Marguerite Moreno, Colette, Irene Adler, and being the kind of woman who finds it difficult to cultivate peers, let alone friends. 

When I was writing [Chez les bêtes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/863164)—a large section of which involves the 16-year-old Irene Adler hero-worshipping, and then becoming disillusioned by, a recently-divorced 35-year-old Colette in the throes of her affair with Mathilde de Morny and her career on the music-hall stage—I was thinking about Colette’s magnetism for Irene as having to do with her dominating personality, and the degree to which that serves a aspirational for Irene herself. Irene at 16 has just come to terms with her inability to embrace the kind of life her own mother wanted for her, in which she would submit to and take care of a man in exchange for material security. She’s casting around for a substitute mother-figure who will model female autonomy/control and also non-heteronormative possibilities; and who better than this charismatic bully holding audiences captive in a cross-dressing musical revue, who seems to rule everyone around her? Because Irene has no concept, especially at 16, of ever relaxing her dominant stance in any part of her life, and because she’s never been allowed much room for playfulness or frivolity, she feels betrayed when she witnesses Colette and Missy playing out a scene in which Colette takes the submissive, “daughterly” role to Missy’s stern mother-figure. To Irene, this proves that the Colette she had built up in her own mind was, in some way, false—an impression I can only imagine increases when Colette later abandons the queer possibilities of the music-hall to marry Henry Jouvenel. Even so, Irene remains obsessed with trying to get close to that imaginary Colette, the one who could have been a queer mother-figure to her. 

All of which is to say: all of my initial thinking around the Colette/Irene parallel had to do with female autonomy, sexualized power, and carving out a space for queer desire. 

But on the last few read-throughs, I’ve been struck by another affinity between the two women—or maybe just the flip side of my original perspective—which is that they both find it extremely difficult to really make friends, especially with other women. In _Secrets of the Flesh_ , Thurman writes of Marguerite Moreno, up-and-coming powerhouse actress whom Colette met at the apartment of Catulle Mendès, father of Claudine Holmès and long-time partner of Augusta Holmès:

> Moreno became something very rare, if not unique, in Colette’s life: a peer. Their correspondence has a candor missing from nearly all of her exchanges with other friends, whom she would address in a voice that was maternal, filial, or collegial, but not confiding. Her familiar speech and her un-Parisian physicality often misled casual acquaintances to think that they and Colette were on intimate terms when she was, on the contrary, a fiercely guarded woman who was discovering [at 22] that she was good at fooling the world. 

  
“A fiercely guarded woman who is good at fooling the world” but with whom a host of people feel themselves to be on intimate terms, also describes Irene. In fact, the lack of true peers and confidantes is even more striking in Irene’s case than in Colette’s. Even “filial” or “collegial” is a stretch for Irene: she has a young protege, and any number of power-exchange clients and lovers, and a network of vendors whom she pays to keep up her physical image. But she’s never had much modelling for non-transactional relationships; and by this point she’s systematically deprioritized them for so long that I think they seem almost unnerving to her.

I think there are several facets to the sort of moment of crisis that’s motivating Irene to uproot herself and leave Paris when she is, and that she herself is conscious of only a small fraction of them. And one of them which she doesn’t really realize, because she has nothing to compare it to, is the gaping hole in her life where a few even standard friendships might otherwise be. There are points in Part 2 where this gets particularly poignant for me; and it’s actually a lot of what underlies my thinking about that Irene-in-1923 story ~~that I am definitely not going to write~~. I think it’s a lot of what underlies my enjoyment of her dynamic with Sherlock, too; she actually has this little repeated fantasy that the two of them are school friends, which is simultaneously absurd (nobody’s behavior in any part of this scene is objectively reminiscent of the way “school friends” relate) and also, at least for me, poignant (because it points up the fact that Irene has no lived experience of how friends relate, and also that she wishes, however conflictedly, that she did). But it wasn’t until this most recent read-though that I really made the connection between this characteristic as it relates to Colette and Marguerite Moreno, in the story Claudine tells in this chapter as well as in Thurman’s biography, and the same characteristic as it relates to Irene. It’s definitely something that I want to explore further in her future instalments. 

Next time: an unexpected historical multitude of Germaines, and their role in shaping the outline of this story.


	10. DVD Extras: Chapter 10: Unweave, unwind, unravel

**In which Irene is surprised by an early-morning visit from Sherlock Holmes, who apparently wants to strategize over coffee and pastry—and who unwittingly provides her with the key to the location of her photographs. Later, Sherlock sends a telegram, takes a walk on the beach, and reads Irene’s intelligence about John’s movements in Paris.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on the bevy of Germaines which fell into my lap, and the development of this version of Germaine Beaumont (mildly spoiler-y for future, already-published chapters). 

Several plot elements in this novel grew out of historical coincidences. I’ve already talked about how [the discovery of the composer Augusta Holmès](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17231921/chapters/40522148), with her surname that recalls Sherlock’s, her daughter whose name recalls one of Colette’s most famous heroines, and her music which was apparently popular in the fin de siècle “smoky lesbian bistros of Montmartre,” served as the germ for Sherlock’s French backstory, and for the character of Claudine Holmès. Another, less significant but still very helpful discovery came after I’d [decided to use the Roz Ven house party as an organizing principle](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17231921/chapters/40522250#workskin), when I was trawling back through my source materials trying to solidify my cast of characters.

Like most biographies of people with large, ever-shifting social circles, my main source for the Colette material, Judith Thurman’s _Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette_ glancingly introduces a huge number of figures, referring to most of them by surname only after their initial introduction. On a first read-through I had no reason to pay particular attention to most of them, or get super-clear on what their relationships were to each other. Colette was the kind of woman who liked to have her every whim catered to, and by this point in her life she had the money to pay some folks to do that catering, and the cultural and personal cache to attract others free of charge. Germaine Beaumont, with her fabulous story of being forcibly comforted with prawns by her mother’s best friend Colette after her mother’s death (which I ended up using in [Chapter 4](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1543718/chapters/3443636)), did attract my attention from very early on, but at the point when I was trying to solidify details of the more minor characters, I hadn’t figured out just what use I could make of her.

Digging back through Thurman to fill in first names and occupations in my house party roster, I realized that Henry Jouvenel’s acknowledged mistress (with whom his wife Colette was also most likely getting it off that summer), Mlle. Patat, shared the first name Germaine. A coincidence! which I recorded in my notes along with the fact that she was tiny, blonde, and working to establish her own fashion house. And then, while digging on the internet for information about one of the most shadowy and tangential characters, the wife of novelist and Jouvenel hanger-on Francis Carco, I discovered that her first name was _also_ Germaine. At which point I couldn’t help laughing at the possible confusion wrought by having in this house—where everyone was pining after everyone else, gaming everyone else, and going behind each other’s backs to sleep with each other’s spouses, sons, and family members—three women with the same name.

So: why not use it? That’s just the kind of planned coincidence around which so many Golden Age mysteries revolve: an unlikely physical resemblance, a hidden genetic link, or some other shared attribute not immediately apparent. And since the first half of _A hundred hours_ in particular is playing with a lot of those country-house mystery tropes, this real-life detail seemed like a fun one to incorporate.

Which it was; and it also ended up doing a lot of work for me in my outlining. The idea of having multiple characters overhear, and make different assumptions about, someone crying out _Germaine!_ in the night, followed pretty quickly on the heels of my decision to use the triple-Germaine threat, and once that was in place a lot of other things followed. I knew immediately that one of the overhear-ers must be Sherlock—prowling the house anxiously and trying not to think about John—at which point it seemed delightfully clear that the other overhear-er should be his doppelgänger Irene.

And why, in stories like this, does it matter who is where with whom at a given time? Plainly someone in the house would have to be up to something that night—committing some crime or at least acting in a suspicious way—and whichever Germaine was in bed with Henry Jouvenel at the time, could be crossed off the list of suspects. Which suggested that there ought to be some confusion about which Germaine it was; that the logical Germaine for the job would turn out, in the end, to be the wrong one. So the entire thread of the sinister call from the St. Malo telephone box to John’s hotel room in the middle of the night, and the subsequent assumptions and discoveries around who might or might not have made that call, came out of this coincidence of the three Germaines. And that, in turn, did a ton of work for me on the John/Sherlock front, because I could have John be absent from his hotel at the time when the call came in, which would be an anxiety-inducing detail that nonetheless doesn’t provide Sherlock with much information about where John actually was, or what he was doing.

Also, once I knew that the three Germaines would feature largely, and that one of them at least would have some culpability in the MacGuffin-hunt aspect of the plot, I happily latched onto the opportunity to make greater use of Germaine Beaumont. I don’t remember exactly when I cast her as Irene’s sexual-sparring-with-accidental-feelings partner, but it was somewhere right around here in the planning process. I liked the idea of Sherlock and Irene coming to different snap assumptions about the overheard _Germaine!_ and since it was logical for Sherlock to assume Henry Jouvenel would be sleeping with his publicly-acknowledged mistress (Germaine Patat), Irene needed an equally logical reason to come to a different conclusion. If she’d met Germaine Beaumont previously, especially in a sexual context, and wasn’t familiar with either of the other Germaines at the house, she’d naturally assume the Germaine in question to be the one she knew. By the law of pleasing literary symmetry, the Germaine actually in bed with Jouvenel should then turn out to be the previously-unsuspected third, Germaine Carco. In the end, I was able to have Irene and Sherlock progress toward that realization in a helpfully staggered way: in this chapter Irene pulls ahead, which lets her track down Germaine Beaumont in Paris in Chapters 11-12 without Sherlock realizing immediately what she’s up to.

Incidentally, I’m so glad that this little historical coincidence provided an “in” for developing Germaine Beaumont a bit, because I enjoy her immensely as a character. Colette was often nagging her, in real life, for her stodgy practicality and her lack of glamour; and I had a good time playing with the assumptions people make about someone like that, and their invisibility. I also liked the idea that for Irene—who for all her judginess about other people being hung up on the past is absolutely obsessed with it herself—Germaine’s throwback fashion and her currently-unfashionable body type, reminiscent of the Gibson Girl ideal of Irene’s childhood—would carry a poignant eroticism that takes her a bit by surprise, even before she figures out that Germaine is (the ultimate aphrodisiac for Irene Adler) an A+ liar.

Next week: spreadsheeting a four-way sex scene so that it can be told differently for two different audiences.


	11. DVD Extras: Chapter 11: And the way up is the way down

**As the houseguests desert Roz Ven to return to the city, Sherlock searches the room of Colette’s young step-son-cum-paramour, and discovers his disappointingly mundane pornography collection. Meanwhile, back in Paris, Irene hunts down Germaine Beaumont for some much more thorough and inventive interrogations, which involve an alternate version of a story she has told before.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on brainstorming and then spreadsheeting a single four-way sex scene from two different narrative priorities:

This idea occurred to me sort of midway through the outlining of this story, and is probably the single biggest technical challenge of Part 1: what if a character told a story about a sexual encounter in their past twice, changing nothing about the choreography (the facts of what happened), and never letting one version directly contradict the other, but nonetheless so altering the interpretation or narrative focus of their telling, that the story became a different beast?

I can’t totally reconstruct the genesis of this idea, although once it sprouted, letting recreational storyteller and sexual manipulator Irene do the heavy lifting on it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. Early on I knew that Irene nursed an estranged obsession with Colette in particular and older mother-figures in general; that Colette was historically married to Henry Jouvenel during the war and the early 1920s; that Jouvenel historically had an ultra-dramatic ongoing feud with rival newspaperman Charles Humbert; and that both men had served as French officers during the war. If I meant to snag the photographs-as-MacGuffin idea from the original “Scandal in Bohemia,” and then what might this Irene’s photographs depict? And why would she care to get them back? She doesn’t have personal ~respectability~ to protect, but she does have an image—a brand, I suppose, in modern terms—which she cares about managing. She likes to be in control, and also, maybe even more importantly, seem in control. Her obsession with a more experienced, more self-assured woman (Colette, for example) is about wanting that control but it’s also a threat to that control—so, what if Colette wasn’t an isolated case? What if there was another older, more self-assured woman who also became an object of Irene’s shameful (to her), control-threatening crushes? Once I had the shadow of Gretha in place, an Irenian investment in Henry Jouvenel due to his link with Colette, a homoerotic power struggle between Jouvenel and the main antagonist, and a shared wartime past in which the two men would historically have been on leave simultaneously in summer of 1915, the skeleton of this foursome began to take shape.

As I recall, this whole train of research actually kicked off my research into the historical brothel Le Chabanais. I had placed Irene, when she first came to Paris in 1908, at the fictional sapphic brothel La Garçonnière. But plainly, in order to put her in a m/m/f/f foursome with Charles Humbert and Henry Jouvenel in 1915, she would have to have moved to a different place of employment. It makes sense to me, though, that she would: she’s materially ambitious and emotionally self-sabotaging, and La Garçonnière would be too small and too enjoyable a pond for her to swim in long. Le Chabanais was one of the premier brothels in a fin de siècle Paris full to bursting with opportunities for sexual tourism, which makes it both a feather in Irene’s cap to work there; but from an authorial perspective it also means there is a lot of great documentation on the history of the place, and what the entrance, salon, and individual rooms looked like. Since Le Chabanais is one of two brothels that become major settings of Part 2, this came in handy—and even before Part 2, the detail of their themed rooms allowed me to adapt BBC Irene’s black brocade fleur-de-lis brand into this universe, and start developing her relationship to it (in 1914: triumphant; by 1921: bored, bored, oppressively bored).

So at this point I had: a remembered Charles/Henry/Irene/Gretha foursome at Le Chabanais, which happened in summer of 1915 when both men were on leave and Gretha was lying low at Le Chabanais. There were three aspects of this foursome that particularly interested me: the obsessive and (I would argue historically) erotically-charged rivalry between Charles and Henry; Irene’s complicated push-pull investment in Henry due to his proximity to Colette; and Irene’s covetously guarded infatuation with Gretha. The second of these ties into Irene’s arc as a whole in this universe, but the first and third played better with this particular story as it was developing.

In particular, I liked the idea of foregrounding the m/m eroticism with the first version of the story, and then pivoting to reveal the f/f eroticism with the second. From an in-story perspective, this makes sense to me for several reasons. It shows, for one thing, the very gradual letting-down of Irene’s barriers with regard to Germaine: her personal feelings about her crush on Gretha are much greater and more cautiously guarded than her amused observations of the Charles/Henry dalliance, and the Germaine version of this story costs her more to tell. (Though… she’s certainly still tailoring her narrative to her audience’s interests, in the service of getting something she wants; I think the temptation to read the second version as the “true” one is too simple.) The m/m to f/f progression also demonstrates what Irene’s accustomed to: foregrounding and playing to the desires of men. Meaning both, in this instance, foregrounding the desires of Charles and Henry, and also playing to the desires and preoccupations of Sherlock, who is her first audience for this story and whose lover, she knows, just spent the night with a man from his military past. There were authorial reasons I liked this progression, too: Irene’s not the only one trained to foreground the desires of men, and it seemed to me that, for many readers, the Charles/Henry tension would make a better blind for the Irene/Gretha one, than vice versa.

So now I knew I wanted a version I of this story that was Charles/Henry-centric, tailored to torment Sherlock about John; and a version II of the same story that was Irene/Gretha-centric, tailored to persuade Germaine Beaumont to self-disclose. I pretty quickly realized that when I was doing the actual drafting, I would need to be able to focus on the “tailoring” level of what’s going on: there’s a whole set of present-day choreography and interpersonal dynamics between Irene & Sherlock and Irene & Germaine, and keeping track of all that plus having to create past-tense choreography and interpersonal dynamics was more than I could keep in my brain at once. So I decided to spreadsheet out the choreography of the original foursome, with the slant that Irene is going to give each section of that choreography, so that I could look at each stage side by side and make sure that (a) the two versions matched up against each other in terms of physical movements, and (b) in both versions, all actions make sense in terms of the motivation of all “characters” involved (meaning, all four players as Irene is choosing to portray them to her chosen audience—while she doesn’t outright lie in either version of this story, she is being very selective with her facts in both of them).

Screenshots below of how that spreadsheet panned out. I actually ended up with three columns, labeled with storyteller, audience, and key themes/goals/preoccupations of that telling: “Version 1: Irene to Sherlock (Jealousy, infidelity, m/m homoeroticism),” “Version 2: Irene to Germaine Beaumont (Male cluelessness, Irene’s expertise, f/f homoeroticism,” and a third, mostly-blank column, “Version 3: Sherlock to himself, later (But why does Irene care about the photographs?).” Mild spoilers, I guess, for Chapter 12, in that third column—there is, of course, one last reveal that comes out of this foursome, which has to do with Gretha, but this spreadsheet doesn’t give away anything that’s not already up in chapters.

Anyway, then in the rows, I broke down the foursome choreography by chronological blocks: “Irene’s rooms, Le Chabanais” (this is the backstory Irene doesn’t share with Sherlock at all), “Common Room, Le Chabanais,” “Dining Room, Le Chabanais,” “The Stairs,” “Irene’s Rooms,” “Tying Henry,” “Henry’s Wrists,” “Henry’s Elbows,” “Henry’s Ankles,” “Irene’s Cock,” “Strip Tease/Shoe Licking,” “Begging,” and “The Aftermath/The Photographs.” The idea is that, in each row, the same physical actions should be taking place; the text in each cell just pins down the spin on those physical actions. (Click to see at a legible size. Also, NB: I occasionally typed “Gerda” instead of “Gretha” in this document, because I was writing a modern, mostly-nonmagical lesbian adaptation of “The Snow Queen” at the same time):

 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
There was, as I recall, a fair amount of tugging at this and that in order to get the two versions to line up: a piece of choreography that might be suggested by the m/m-centric version wouldn’t end up working in the f/f-centric version, or vice versa; and then adding the third column meant that I needed to finesse Gretha’s behavior in both versions without making a big deal out of it in either one. But being able to look at each piece of choreography side-by-side made that tugging and adjusting SO much easier, holy cow. And once I’d got a version that was generally sound, having this document as a reference point was tremendously useful; quite apart from letting me focus on the present-day narration while writing both Chapter 8 and Chapter 11, I don’t think I could have kept this level of baroque fourway choreography straight in my head over the course of however long it took me to write Chapters 9 and 10.

Next time: further DVD navel-gazing on Irene’s arc, and her future in this universe. And the week after that: NEW MATERIAL.


	12. DVD Extras: Chapter 12: And the way forward is the way back

**In which Germaine, as the bathwater cools, tells Irene a story in exchange for the one she’s just been told, and Irene startles herself with an unplanned proposition. Meanwhile, a sleep-deprived Sherlock, en route to a reunion with John in Paris, comes to a realisation about the company Irene must have kept, during the War.**

***

DVD extras navel gazing on Irene’s Saturn-returns moment and the future of her arc in this universe:

I’ve been focusing disproportionately on Irene in these Part 1 DVD extras posts, because in Part 2 she to a large degree withdraws from the narrative. There are still little amuse-bouches of her narration at the beginning of each chapter, and she’s often machinating behind the scenes of John and Sherlock’s narrations; but with the detonation that is Chapter 13, the narrative becomes very John-and-Sherlock focused. For this reason I haven’t been dwelling on either of them too much in the extras notes for Part 1, because I knew that I would have plenty of space to go into my thoughts on their arc in the notes to Part 2. Before that happens, though, I’d like to give one more week to my farewell-for-now thoughts on Irene, in _A hundred hours_ in particular and the Unreal Cities universe in general.

I actually really struggled, as I finished Part 1, with the degree to which I’d planned to cut her point of view out of the second part of the novel. My original plan, as I remember it ([greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) has a slightly different recollection) was to have the chapters in Part 1 follow the pattern:

1a. Irene POV / 1b. Sherlock POV  
2a. Sherlock POV / 2b. Irene POV  
3a. Irene POV / 3b. Sherlock POV

and then to have Part 2 chapters follow the pattern:

13\. John POV  
14\. Sherlock POV  
15\. John POV

This would obviously have cut Irene out of the narration completely after the break between the parts, much like John isn’t a narrator until Chapter 13. All of this planning was prior to diving down the rabbit hole that was writing [Chez les bêtes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/863164), and prior to actually writing the Irene POV sections of Part 1 of _A hundred hours_. Pretty early in the planning process for AHH, I knew that I wanted to write another Irene story set in 1926, after her return to London. Tumblr archives indicate that I was already seriously planning this story by November of 2012. Because of this, while outlining AHH, I felt okay with having her uninvolved in Part 2 of this novel, and with leaving some of her arcs unresolved at the end of this novel, because I knew that there would be another, Irene-centric, instalment; whereas I had and have no immediate plans for another John-and-Sherlock-centric sequel. 

But when it came down to it, after I’d spent so much time with Irene in Part 1, it felt lopsided and wrong to cut her entirely from Part 2. Ideally, once all the stories in this universe are done I’d like the final reading experience of her arc to be one of a stream continually narrowing and expanding, but never quite drying up. And I soon realized that Part 2 was going to be so long that cutting Irene’s narration from it completely would amount to a drying-up of her stream. So I reconceived my structure to look like:

13a. Irene POV (mini-scene) / 13b. John POV (maxi scene)  
14a. Irene POV (mini-scene) / 14b. Sherlock POV (maxi scene)  
15a. Irene POV (mini-scene) / 15b. John POV (maxi scene)

Et cetera. I actually think those little Irene mini-scenes ended up doing quite a bit of narrative work, in the end; there are two in particular that materially add to the suspense and impart essential information that I can’t now recall how I was going to communicate to the reader. So I think it ended up being a better-advised decision than simply my soft-heartedness in not wanting to give up spending time with one of my faves. 

I wrote a little bit in the Chapter 9 notes about how one element in Irene’s compulsion in _A hundred hours_ to shake things up turn her established life on its head, is her unconscious or semi-conscious perception of the emptiness in her life occupying the place where friendships might normally be. There are others, of course. I think one’s late 20s and early 30s are often a time of upheaval and transition; they were for me and they have been for many folks I know. One has (often) achieved a stasis of one kind or another, an identity of one kind or another, certain proficiencies with which one is comfortable; and one has time to take a breath, look around, and start questioning whether this place one has ended up is where one wants to be. In Irene’s case, she’s reached the top of a trajectory that was originally motivated by a survival instinct and a sort of desperate, gut-level refusal to give up her autonomy; now that she’s in a much more materially comfortable situation, all that energy, drive, and dissatisfaction remain within her but with no clear referent. She’s conscious of having lost or missed out on certain things, as a result of her life choices (family life, friends, a relationship with her mother)—she’s very aware of those things as negative space, but has no real conception of what they might look like as positive space. And she doesn’t like that not knowing—though at the same time, actively disliking not knowing, isn’t the same thing at all a actively wanting the unknown things themselves. I’d like her final story or stories to be about that process of (a) becoming consciously aware of those specific absences, and (b) trying to suss out whether they’re welcome absences or not. Which is a difficult task, for a person as emotionally well-armored as Irene, who is accustomed to not allowing herself the leeway to make mistakes or show weakness of any sort. 

Lastly, during the Britpicking process [pennypaperbrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennypaperbrain) asked the following about Irene:

> I’m curious about how ‘bad’ or otherwise you see your Irene as being, given the huge moral stigmas that surround her (in both universes) + misogyny + the fact that she clearly does many things that are not very nice.

  
This is a bit of a difficult question for me to answer considering that my own sort of… moral judgments… of my characters, are generally not at the top of my consciousness as I’m writing them. There are exceptions—my Rope/Leopold & Loeb mashup [As terriers shake a rat](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13050177), for example, was difficult to write because I found it difficult to muster empathy for people at once that privileged and also that casually cruel. Irene, by contrast, does most of her morally questionable things in order to maintain (a) her baseline survival and (b) her personal autonomy. She pickpockets and otherwise steals; it’s implied that she blackmails people, or at least collects intelligence to enable her to blackmail them if she needs to; she house-breaks; she spies on people and has them followed; she lies and manipulates people almost constantly. It’s true that none of this is _nice_ , and I don’t condone this kind of behavior in real life. But in Irene’s case, my sympathy is largely with her. For one thing, nobody around her is very nice, either; to the extent that she’s had “niceness” modeled for her, it was just another husband-catching tool, and resulted in extreme loss of personal agency. And for another thing, a lot of her actions are either direct reactions to, or preemptive strikes against, people who are trying to machinate against her or otherwise use her. The housebreaking and surveillance are because she’s been threatened in her place of employment, and (she believes) followed from Paris to the provinces. Her quest for the pictures is, like ACD Irene Adler’s, an attempt to maintain control of her own life in the face of men who are trying to use her image against her. It never really occurred to me to condemn her for those actions, which I find very understandable! The lying and manipulation have become an unquestioned way of life in a way that I think is kind of sad and fucked-up, and also fascinating, but they started as very much survival strategies, and I have a difficult time judging her for that.

She’s also a sadist, which I don’t condemn either. Even if some of the ways she allows it to manifest (largely the nonsexual ones) are not exactly jake by RACK standards. But even there, I honestly think she’s doing surprisingly well considering the models she’s had to work with. Who could have expected her to conceptualize a world not dominated by constant power struggles, when this is the one in which she’s always lived?

Next time: NEW MATERIAL in the form of Chapter 13, the one that ate a solid year of my life.


	13. DVD Extras: Chapter 13: The patient is no longer here

**(Two days earlier)**

**In which John Watson goes to Paris, runs into his ex-lover Daniel, and has a truly, truly terrible night.**

***

NEW STUFF, Y’ALL. I’m just going to reiterate for the last time: things past this point very much earn all of the warning tags on the story. Reminder that these tags include Underage, Graphic Depictions of Violence, Infidelity, Consent Issues, Drug Use, and Mental Health Issues. Take care of yourselves. 

At the link: a special audio version of DVD extra navel-gazing with special guest [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) (along with a couple of non-audio bonbons), about the chapter which took me a literal year (or more) of solid work. Listen to Gins and I ramble about, among other things, the evolution of the many different Chapter 13 drafts; various narrative dead-ends that were tried and discarded; what exactly about the characterization and politics in this chapter made it so difficult to write; what our beta process was like; the process of de-aging Daniel and different kinds of reader discomfort; our respective faulty memories of the composition and revision process; my musical listening habits while writing the back half of this novel; and the intentional and unintentional ways AHH ends up interacting with the other stories in this universe. ~Enjoy~

[I]

**Gins:** LOL remember how, in early versions of Chapter 13, John wasn’t actually going to cheat on Sherlock?  
**HBBO:** Yes! Yes I do.  
**Gins:** That was. Something.  
**HBBO:** I feel like… at a lot of points in the Chapter 13 arc, John feels a sort of security doing what he’s doing because in his mind he’s just definitely not the kind of person who cheats on his partner, HOWEVER THIS MIGHT LOOK  
**Gins:** Yeahhhh  
**HBBO:** And at the same time, I felt a sort of security doing what I was doing because in my mind I just definitely wasn’t the kind of person who writes about infidelity, HOWEVER THIS MIGHT LOOK  
**Gins:** LOLOL  
**HBBO:** And both John and I had to go on an epic voyage into the underworld of self-discovery before we could emerge, battle-scarred  
**Gins:** ahahahahahahahaha  
**HBBO:** sadder yet wiser, on the other side

[II]

**Gins:** You probably wrote a whole novel’s worth of drafts of Chapter 13, if you put them all together.  
**HBBO:** Ha, yes. Accurate.  
**Gins:** Like a Groundhog Day type of novel.  
**HBBO:** Yeah, except in Groundhog Day the Bill Murray character keeps doing the same day better and better until eventually he’s pretty good at it, and it’s a pretty good day  
**HBBO:** Whereas in the iterative novel that is successive versions of Chapter 13, John Watson does the same night worse and worse until eventually he fucks it up beyond all imagining, and it’s one of the worst days of his life.  
**Gins and HBBO:** \o/

 

####  [LISTEN TO US CHAT ON DROPBOX](https://www.dropbox.com/s/w1amwiy4mq54gud/Ch%2013%20chat%20master%20final.mp3?raw=1)

(Spoilers for the chapter, obviously. Also, note that this file is actually three chats edited together; the first two were right after one another, but the third was on a later night; you can definitely tell the difference when it transitions to this one.)


	14. DVD Extras: Chapter 14: Keeping his seasons and rages

**(Later)**

**In which Sherlock and John are reunited in Paris, John attempts a confession, Sherlock attempts a reconciliation, and they have a brutal row.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on the non-chronological structure of this novel between Chapter 13 and Chapter 21 (mild spoilers for the structure of the novel, I guess): 

For a while, when I was first conceptualizing _A hundred hours_ , my plan was to structure Part 1 of the story much as it is in the final version—alternating Irene’s POV with Sherlock’s, and withholding John’s POV until Part 2—but to then flash back and tell _the entirety of the previous two days from John’s POV, all in Chapter 13_. It quickly became apparent—as the cafe-to-brothel sequence alone became more and more intense in its conception—that this was not only a totally insane proposition, but that it would be really ineffective from the perspective of building narrative tension. It would have meant probably 50-60K of John’s interactions with Daniel, in which we wouldn’t see Sherlock at all; and the reader would inevitably have lost momentum on Sherlock’s narration. This was not the goal. What I really wanted was to tell this story—which Sherlock has already glimpsed in bits and pieces from Irene’s surveillance, and about which he’s jumped to certain conclusions—from John’s POV, and to have it become clear in John’s POV that a good amount of what Sherlock has assumed about John’s motivations, is wrong; while at more or less the same time continuing to push forward the consequences of John’s actions for Sherlock, and for the Sherlock/John relationship—and via these sections, to make it clear that there’s an extent to which it doesn’t really matter what John’s motivations were. That tension around the relevance/importance of motivations was definitely something I wanted to maintain throughout Part 2.

So I hit upon this idea of a staggered chronology, in which John’s POV alternates with Sherlock’s, but John’s sections are in flashback and Sherlock’s are in the novel’s present. The two chronologies gradually draw closer together, until in Chapter 21 they merge. I ended up really liking what this does for the story as a whole, to the extent that I kind of can’t believe it wasn’t part of my original plan. Since so much of this story is about the effects of cataclysm, both personal and global, I think it’s very fitting that Chapter 13—the locus of both the war trauma and the interpersonal betrayal—would function like a detonation that blows the chronology apart, into a fractured state. (The idea that the wound caused by that explosion would knit back together by Chapter 21, which is only a few days later, is probably unrealistically optimistic, even if that knitting-together is very fragile and tentative, but I still liked the structural mirroring of the reconciliation processes that both John and Sherlock separately, and then John & Sherlock together, have to go through.) 

The staggered timeline also gave me more freedom, somehow, to really sink into Sherlock’s POV in his chapters. During the parts of this chapter, 14, when Sherlock is compulsively agony-fantasizing about being allowed to participate in the intensely connective and emotional sex that he imagines John and Daniel must have had together: for reasons I’ll be able to talk about at greater length later on in the story, I don’t think I would have let myself get as deep into that headspace if I hadn’t known that John’s perspective would bracket it on both sides. It would also have been more difficult to write John’s responses during this chapter, of course, both in the confession/abortive sex scene and during the fight. But it was really Sherlock’s heartbreak that I was resistant to giving full rein to; IIRC even with the staggered timeline, [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) still had to push me to deepen the Sherlock chapters in this direction. And I agree that I really needed to be able to do that, in order for the story to work as a whole. 

But doing the timeline this way also created some challenges. Obviously, one of the primary sources of narrative tension, the question “What will happen next?”, goes away when the reader already knows what happened. This was always one of my big challenges with Chapter 13: throughout all those 20 or however many drafts, the basic events never changed, because they were already part of the story via Irene’s intelligence to Sherlock—but in the case of Chapter 13, the desire to know why those events happened, which has hopefully been building ever since Chapter 7, is enough to create that tension. I had to keep thinking, though, about how to set up similar… motivational cliffhangers, I suppose, in the chapters that followed. Going from Sherlock chapters to John chapters, I was pretty consistently showing effects prior to causes, so I wanted to do that in a way that upped the tension, rather than rendering what was coming less interesting because the reader would already know what had happened. So sources of tension become not so much “what’s going to happen/what happened?” as “okay, X happened: BUT WHY?” and “How much does so-and-so know about what happened?” and I spent a lot of time thinking about when the reveals on both those questions should happen. 

For example, I knew that John and Daniel would have another interaction, in Daniel’s atelier, which means John has to seek Daniel out again after the events of Chapter 13. At some point in the present, Sherlock will know this too because of his and Irene’s continued surveillance of John. So there’s a kind of nested set of revelations to deal with: when does the reader learn that John goes back to Daniel’s place, and when does Sherlock learn that and what does he think about it, and also when does the reader learn that Sherlock knows it? I eventually ended up having that last revelation be the first of the bunch, so that that knowledge could be part of what motivates him throughout Chapter 14, but have that only become apparent to the reader in the last moments of the chapter; while still maintaining the tension around why John did such a thing. That kind of motivational jigsaw puzzle wasn’t something I’d ever done before, quite; it was a learning experience for sure.

Next time: the pattern in this story of trying to render non-verbal mental states using words. (Or: curling up on the floor of my apartment, sobbing and typing nonsensical phrases into my computer after having bloodwork done.)


	15. DVD Extras: Chapter 15: You cannot face it steadily

**(Earlier)**

**In which John, caught in a fugue state between his wartime past and his present reality, stumbles away from the Hôtel Marigny and has an encounter with a small dog. Later, he speaks with Sherlock on the phone, gets some much-needed sleep, and takes a walk around Paris.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on trying to render in prose mental states in which the POV character has very limited (or nonstandard) access to language. Mild, very vague spoilers for a future moment in Sherlock’s arc. Also, content warnings for discussion of my personal experiences with dissociation and PTSD triggers, and how I (fail to) relate to language at those times.

Part 2 of this novel has a couple of sections in which the POV character is narrating from a mental state in which their access to words—and even more so, their ability to use words to make meaning of their present reality, to the extent that they’re experiencing it—is _extremely_ limited. At the end of 13 and in the opening section of 15, that POV character is John and he is having a traumatic dissociative episode; later on, in Chapter 20, that character will be Sherlock and there will be a different set of circumstances. As a result, the quality of Sherlock’s lack of words-access will be different to the quality of John’s lack of words-access in this chapter. So I struggled, not only with the initial challenge of drafting both of these chapters individually when my chosen medium was making meaning out of words but the narrating character’s in-the-moment relationship to words and their meanings was tenuous at best, but also with the challenge of making John’s narration in Chapter 15 qualitatively distinct from Sherlock’s narration in Chapter 20. (On which, more later. In the essay below I focus pretty much exclusively on Chapter 15.)

Both the Chapter 15 section and the Chapter 20 section draw on personal experiences I’ve had, which was… helpful, I guess, although also frustrating. Obviously, I have never been a World War I army doctor, nor am I a veteran of any war; but during the period when I was working on Chapter 15—and also earlier, during the interminable period when I was revising Chapter 13—I did have a couple of bad dissociative episodes caused by having my PTSD triggered while I was also otherwise compromised (in one case extremely ill and in one case extremely drunk). So both of those memories (this is not the right word) were (kind of) fresh in my mind. Or at least close by in my timeline. 

I’m visibly struggling even to write about it here, because my experience, at least, of this kind of mental state is that it is extremely resistant to—god, to _being rendered_ , I suppose. Resistant, even, to doing the interpretive work of rendering oneself to oneself, in the moment. By which I mean: as I go through my day-to-day life, I’m unconsciously or semi-consciously participating in, and creating, a narrative about who I am and what I’m doing. I’m taking in data from the outside world (say I’m in a coffee shop, with a laptop; there is a balding white man in a blue suit to my left, eating a bagel; there is a young Asian mother in a drapey top, with a toddler in a huge fancy stroller, at the register) and comparing it with my understanding of my personal history, comparing and contrasting with other times I’ve been in other coffee shops, and other times I’ve been in places which are not coffee shops, and my memories of other businessmen and other toddlers and the way that I personally metabolize coffee versus tea; I’m fusing that stream of data with my own self-concept to position myself with respect to the world around me, and then I’m mentally rendering that person-in-the-world synthesis so that I can interact, as a being I more or less understand, with a scene I more or less understand. 

A lot of this process flies under the radar of language, of course; if it didn’t then I would never get anything done. But I do rely on language-level thoughts to parse things that I find surprising or otherwise noteworthy. If I notice that the white man in the blue suit is reading Audre Lorde, for example, that will conflict with my expectations sufficiently that language will kick in, in order to theorize and re-situate. Or like, that day last spring when I was sitting by the Starbucks drive-through and suddenly every single person in every single car was ordering something I’d never heard of called a “Unicorn Frappuccino”—that definitely kicked my meaning-making language centers into gear. “What the fresh hell,” I thought, in words, looking at the neon pink-and-blue concoction, comparing them against anything I’d ever seen at all the Starbuckses I’d ever been to, and finding no matches, “is a Unicorn Frappuccino?”

When I’m having a dissociative episode that entire apparatus massively breaks down. The underlying processes of self-perception and world-perception break down: I can’t triage details into noteworthy and not noteworthy, and I can’t access my databanks for comparison, which leaves me unable to make sense of the world around me. At the same time my ability to relate to and make sense of my self is… warped, maybe. It’s as if I’m trapped deeper inside my body and yet also distressingly half-outside my body; as if a corrupted palimpsest of previous versions of my body have been pasted on top of my current one by a five-year-old with poor hand-eye coordination. (This is a VERY writerly, and therefore inaccurate, rendering of the experience.) My particular PTSD triggers have a locus in a particular part of my body, and that part in particular becomes a center for a lot of deep, panicked, wordless revulsion—I viscerally want to put that body part out of sight, ideally to separate it from the rest of my body so as not to have to continue dealing with it. All of these sensations—the overlapping palimpsest lines, the partial remove, the deeper burial, the revulsion and desire to put aside the body or part of the body—all make me unable to access that background self-rendering process that I normally rely on to move through the world. 

Meanwhile, the ability to use language to mediate experience—which is the step my brain would normally escalate to when something interferes with the self/world rendering process—also breaks down. It’s not exactly that I can’t access language at all, as that some…. vital connection, between the subjective reality I’m experiencing in my body and the words I’m capable of accessing, is severed. During the first of these recent experiences, the one when I was very ill, I came home from the doctor and curled up on the floor, sobbing and shaking and also, because I’m me, trying to somehow render the experience I was having via typing words into my laptop. A lot of those words were “No” and “bad”; the text as a whole, both during the episode and later, when I had calmed down, communicated very, very little about what that headspace was actually like. This post, which is the result of several more years of having struggled with and thought about this issue, communicates more about it in an intellectual way, but still nothing about it viscerally. This is frustrating from a writerly perspective, and also from an internal self-rendering perspective. Even in the moment, the fact that I am forced to live in the experience of that badly-fitting revulsion without having the tool of interpretation at my disposal, is extremely distressing. 

So this first part of Chapter 15 does draw a lot on those experiences, although having those experiences also drove home to me how fundamentally opposed this kind of experience is, to being rendered in words. I am normally very at peace with the extent to which composition creates distance between lived reality and an artistic rendering of that reality, but in this particular instance that distance grated. I wanted to get at something more unmediated, yet I was also using the writing process to make sense of an experience which in its unmediated state is, by definition, a negater of meaning. A classic catch-22!

Still, there are some base-level things that ended up being transferrable and useful, I think. This kind of thing is a synthesis of a lot of it:

> Back pressed hard to the trunk of a tree. A tree? River gone, rails gone. Dry grass poking at thighs. Pressed spine hard to living bark. The animal shivered though coated in Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t look. If he could not be. Not be here.  
>   
> Could—could sleep. Bright blood-dark shivering in the blue sun bright dark blood. Shifted careful on its side trying. Putting the here part outside just a bit outside. If he could. Curl it up make it sleep. 

  
The way that John loses time, for example (”A tree? River gone, rails gone.”). His inability to interpret and render his surroundings to himself (“shivering in the blue sun bright dark blood”). Definitely the way that the past experiences which are the locus of this Daniel-triggered episode, sit like an ill-fitting, smothering onion-skin on top of his perception of present-day reality. His unmanageable revulsion at his experience of his own body, where he is trapped. The intrusion of adamant, semi-nonsensical refusal language into thought processes (“… though coated in Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t look”—there was a lot of this kind of thing when I typed words into my laptop that day on my apartment floor). His reluctance to move, because movement brings back physicality, which is a source of revulsion. The way his self-narration shifts from “him/his” to “it/its” pronouns and back again as he tries and fails to get around having to inhabit his body. It’s still pretty unsatisfying to me from the perspective of how composed it is, but I suspect there’s no way around that, really, if it’s also going to be effective/affecting narration.

Next time: My delighted discovery of heroine art historian Agnès Humbert, and how I altered my conception of Chapter 16 in order to incorporate her.


	16. DVD Extras: Chapter 16: The bitter apple and the bite in the apple

**(Later)**

**In which Irene accidentally enjoys some genuine connection with people she likes, and must immediately self-sabotage. Meanwhile Sherlock, alone after his fight with John, takes refuge in investigation and pays a visit to Charles Humbert’s daughter Agnès, who confirms his suspicions about Irene’s photographs.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on the development/discovery of Agnès Sabbagh née Humbert, art historian and mother of two, who is the closest thing to an actualfax war hero in this novel:

Man, 16 was such a cooperative little doll of a chapter, compared to everything surrounding it. The writing process for it just kind of tripped along! La de da de da. (This is not what happened with 15, 17, or any of the other chapters from 13 through 21.) It helped that it was—I was about to write “plotty,” but it’s a pet peeve of mine that we collectively seem to have decided that characters’ emotional arcs don’t count as “plot.” I mean it’s pretty clear that the main conflict/resolution “plot” of the second half of this novel is that John, in a moment of resurgent trauma, betrays Sherlock’s trust, which in turn triggers a kind of moment of questioning and reckoning for Sherlock, and that they both have to work through the fallout from that. By which definition, all of the chapters that deal with their emotional arcs are extremely plotty. If anything,16 perhaps less so than most. So maybe instead I should say that what helped this chapter to go smoothly was that there was a large section of it that was case-related, and the case-level details had all been outlined well in advance, so once Sherlock is in Agnès Sabbagh’s apartment, I knew all the major points they needed to cover and I could progress straightforwardly from one to the next. 

The chapter did change pretty significantly, though, from my first conceptions of it. I had researched Charles Humbert during the initial planning for the book, and I knew that he had a daughter Agnès, and how old she would have been in 1921. I must have even known that she was an art student, because my original idea of her was much more the stereotypical bohemian party girl: I had Sherlock showing up at her apartment and encountering the woman who basically only lingers in the final version in the form of his own preconceptions:

> He’d bargained on Parisian art students still keeping raucous late nights, as they had done of old (as they still—but he shook his head). […]  
>   
> He rang the bell and waited long enough to wonder if the upstairs lamp had, after all, simply been left on; or whether it illuminated Agnès Humbert, underfed and overworked, asleep at her desk still in her artist’s smock with her face smudged and her hair tied up in scarves; or whether she was otherwise occupied—sitting, perhaps, in some fellow-student’s lap, in a party dress or partway out of it—and had simply decided, in the fickle way of artists, to ignore the bell. But there was, at last, a shuffling, and a clicking of the lock, and the creaking open of the door.

  
In that first version, after the opening section of this chapter—Sherlock reels from his fight with John; sets out to distract himself with work by interviewing the Humbert daughter, incidentally making his way back through the neighborhood Claudine lived in back in 1903—I had him interrupt a “raucous late night” like the one he expects here; and encounters Agnès, some variety of half-intoxicated hostess, holding court.

But what type of half-intoxicated hostess? There is frankly so much intoxication and bohemianism in this novel that I was having trouble differentiating Agnès and her little apartment party from, for example, Colette’s motley assortment of lovers and frenemies, or Daniel and Jules’s art student café culture, or the various styles of high living that go on at Le Chabanais (and, more glancingly in this chapter, at La Garçonnière) between Irene and various others. Less than a thousand words into this undifferentiated, bohemian Agnès, I ground to that particular kind of halt that usually means I need to do more research—or, if I’m writing an original character, do more work outside the main text to develop them in my own mind. In this case, I remembered that Agnès was an actual historical person, so I dug a little deeper on her life and discovered that she actually wasn’t much like my (or Sherlock’s) mental stereotypes of a post-WWI art student, at all. 

For one thing, she was at this point married, with two kids. For another, she was well on her way to becoming an intensely serious scholar: an art historian, philosopher and ethnographer who studied at the Sorbonne and the Louvre school, and also practiced her own painting and sculpting—all while raising the before-mentioned two kids. On top of which, she was also a committed Communist, who during WWII helped found the Groupe du musée de l’homme, one of the first organized resistance groups in occupied France, and was later sent to a German work camp for her anti-Nazi organizing, staying on after she was liberated to set up and operate soup kitchens before returning to France to be awarded the Croix de Guerre and resume writing books on art history. So overall, a much more sober and politically-minded person than I had assumed, based on only two scraps of knowledge (”art student” and “26-year-old daughter of corrupt newspaper mogul”). She was plainly someone who had goals, ambitions and convictions from a young age; who had a deep intellectualism that was also grounded in compassion; who navigated interpersonal dynamics with conviction and bravery but also a certain degree of realism; and who was extremely driven: an early version of the woman of the 70s and 80s who insists on “having everything”: a career, a marriage/children, an art practice, and a staggering level of political commitment and engagement. 

I feel like this real-life framework was extremely useful. And particularly that last piece, which let me link Agnès up in my brain with the plethora of women I know personally, of my mother’s generation and otherwise, who have or had complicated relationships with, on one hand, the necessity of constantly and compulsively driving themselves to maximum capacity or past maximum capacity in an effort simply to keep all their various balls in the air while simultaneously being expected to do the same level of emotional labor their mothers were; and, on the other hand, with the repercussions of the kind of hyper-competent image they sometimes end up projecting as a result of all that. Sherlock, in this chapter, is interacting with Agnès at a time when his own image of himself as driven and hyper-competent has been severely shaken; and he pretty much immediately fixates on the facts of both her competence (he calls this, in his internal narration, being “sensible”—high praise) and her experience in realms where he feels very much at sea (in particular: family life; in greater particular: she’s a mother). Almost immediately he feels that she, without really trying or having an investment one way or the other, has more of a handle on their interaction than he himself does; and this is a novel, anxiety-inducing, and simultaneously kind of sad and kind of comforting experience for him. All of which is SO instrumental in terms of getting him where he needs to go in Chapters 18 and 20, that this is another moment when, in retrospect, I kind of can’t believe I wasn’t always going to write Agnès as the exhausted academic mother of two, studying Communism and trying to eke out time for her passion projects on the side. 

Next time: Notes on the development and resolution of the John/Daniel relationship.


	17. DVD Extras: Chapter 17: The past has another pattern

**(Earlier)**

**In which John and Daniel, over the course of a night’s drawing practice, hash out their shared history to the best of their abilities by telling each other lies—and occasional truths—about the War.**

*** 

DVD extra navel-gazing on some thoughts on the meta evolution of Daniel’s mental illness (spoilers for Woolf’s _Mrs Dalloway_ ), and the partial resolution of the John/Daniel relationship:

We’re entering a portion of the arc where it’s difficult to pick out one element and talk about it, because from here through 21 (well really through 24, but particularly through 21), there are a bunch of themes thematic threads that intensify together and can’t really be discussed until they resolve. Chapter 17 was a very meaningful chapter to write, for me, in part because it’s one of two places where the visual art thread gets most intense; but I think I can’t really talk about that at length until a few more chapters in. So instead I’ll talk about what is resolved by the end of 17—or, as much as it will be, anyway—which is the relationship between John and Daniel. 

I think, when I initially gave Daniel Capgras Syndrome in _The Violet Hour_ , I was just kind of riffing on the Septimus Smith character in _Mrs Dalloway_. Not that Septimus has this particular syndrome—he is a shell-shock (read: PTSD) sufferer whose actual symptoms read more like Woolf’s own probable modern-day diagnosis of bipolar disorder (though it’s important to note that this was not a diagnosis in Woolf’s day, and she did not understand her “madness” through this lens), who commits suicide toward the end of the novel. Some of the most affecting parts of Septimus’s narration in Mrs Dalloway involve the porousness and unreliability of his ability to recognize things and people—his wife Lucrezia, his London surroundings, his friend/would-be lover Evans, who died in the war but whose presence he sometimes hallucinates. For Septimus, of course, this porousness, and its relation to his wartime trauma, ends up making his existence untenable. 

Capgras, a neurological syndrome which is sometimes the result of head trauma and which results in the sufferer not recognizing their loved ones and/or being convinced that their loved ones are imposters, while otherwise (when the disorder is not coupled with a more serious one like Alzheimer’s) being largely able to live normally, seemed like a way to take that porousness of recognition, which is so central to Septimus’s character, to a sort of logical extreme while at the same time positing a character who could make a more sustainable life for himself post-war than Septimus is able to do. (Note that lots of people with PTSD and/or bipolar disorder also made & continue to make sustainable lives for themselves as well; also note that Daniel would now almost certainly be diagnosed with PTSD as well as Capgras. But it was particularly the contrast of lack of recognition and seeming “normality”—or least robustness—that I wanted to explore.) Daniel starts out, via John’s narration at the end of _The Violet Hour_ , Septimus levels of tragic, but also resolved; John has essentially written him off as a casualty of the war, as much as if he’d died—but Daniel’s condition doesn’t actually dictate that. One of the earliest kernels of knowledge I had, about the _Violet Hour_ sequel, was that I wanted to get deeper into what happens to Daniel after the war—which I knew would be a life that looks much more “normal” or “functional” than John expects—and explore both how that discovery affects John; and how relating to someone who looks like but “isn’t” John (whom Daniel believes to be dead), affects Daniel. 

Pretty soon after I started working on _A hundred hours_ it became plain that both infidelity and the (in)ability to recognize and “know” other people would be central obsessions of the novel as a whole, not just of the John/Daniel arc. What didn’t become clear to me until I’d spent a year rewriting Chapter 13, was the thread of their interactions where John falls victim to that common and seductive but poisonous misconception that he is somehow going to fix Daniel—and/or the flip side of that idea, exacerbated by the seeming robustness and normality of Daniel’s life in Paris: that Daniel’s disorder is, in some way, pretend; and that as a result he can be pushed or convinced out of it. This was one of the threads I ended up adding to Chapter 13 as it got progressively darker and uglier—the entire section where John is antagonizing and re-traumatizing Daniel, sexually and non-sexually, in a poorly-understood attempt to get Daniel to recognize John. I said in the audio commentary to Chapter 13 that there were a lot of things in that chapter that I initially thought I couldn’t possibly include when they first occurred to me, and which made me extremely uncomfortable to write. This element of John’s behavior is maybe the ugliest and most intensely uncomfortable to me of anything he does, even though I—certainly understand his motivations, in that moment of extremity and however horrifically misguided, for doing it. And I do think it’s necessary that the chapter go there; when I kept the action focused on the dynamic between John and Daniel, and pushed both characters to lean into what they most want from the other and from their current interaction, it felt sort of inevitable.

But once I’d written that, and it was part of the working draft of Chapter 13, then this whole theme of how we relate to the artefacts of other people’s trauma; what we believe about that trauma, and the coping mechanisms we come up with in order to reconcile ourselves to the changes trauma causes to people we love—and also the need for, and sometimes impossibility of, atonement for past wrongs—became a lot more central to what needed to happen in Chapter 17, and to a certain extent also 15. Like—playing the morality accountant is a difficult thing to do with this novel, or at least I hope it is; but for the record, I personally think this semi-intentional triggering of Daniel is far worse than cheating on Sherlock with a prostitute, if we’re going to line up John’s sins and rate them. So if John is going to spend the next few chapters owing Sherlock one hell of an apology (which he does), then he definitely owes Daniel amends of at least equal weight. 

At the same time, though, that thing he owes to Daniel is both harder for John himself to perceive, and a lot more logistically difficult for him to communicate because he can’t speak with Daniel directly about their shared past. I needed John to have a process of realization about what he’d done, and then successive realizations about why he’d done it, including a moment of making explicit to himself that he’d believed, on some level, that Daniel’s disorder was something he (Daniel) was making up; and I wanted that realization to be explicitly sickening, in the moment, both to John and, to some extent, to the reader. And I needed John to be able to find some way to at least partially relate and make amends to Daniel without pushing the buttons that he was hammering on so hard in 13, e.g. he needed to let go of his own need for Daniel to acknowledge his (John’s) identity, and also let go of his own half-expectation that he is going to be able to cure Daniel. Care guides for people with Capgras Syndrome sometimes encourage caregivers to enter the person’s realm of reality if possible (i.e. support the person’s delusion rather than rejecting it), which is essentially what John has been groping toward since Chapter 2, when he introduced himself to Daniel as his own late brother, Mark. But in 17 he has to find a way to relate as Mark, using Mark’s story (reconstructed by John after Mark’s death), but in a way that’s meaningful for Daniel, and for John, and that speaks to their past relationship. 

So, you know. Easy peasy! Get to it, John.

I think he does surprisingly well. But I also think it’s important, in context of the larger novel, that the… level of success, of this constrained and cobbled-together attempt at communication, be both less than perfect and better than a total failure. And overall I feel good about the degree to which I hit that mark. It’s successful enough that John is able to communicate some of his shame and contrition by adapting his brother’s story rather than directly referencing his own, and Daniel is able to articulate to “Mark,” in a way that feels fairly frank and that John is also able to recognize, his own perception of their past relationship. Together, those two things seem about as positive an outcome as either of them could hope for. 

In any case, the levels of recognition, self-realization, disclosure and non-disclosure going on in this long conversation between John and Daniel made it definitely one of my favorite sections to write in the whole novel. Like. Talk about a combination I enjoy. So that’s worth something!

Next time: notes on Julia Kristeva and Sherlock’s in-progress nose dive.


	18. DVD Extras: Chapter 18: The ragged rock in the restless waters

**(Later)**

**In which Sherlock, in a rapidly-deteriorating attempt at distracting himself with his Work, visits Le Chabanais, where he makes (sort of) a new friend, then breaks into Irene Adler’s rooms and is faced with unwelcome reminders of his own past.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on threading together the self-tightening knot of issues around personae, professionalism, origins, and the fundamental inability to know other people, which is perpetuating Sherlock’s nose-dive in this chapter and Chapter 20 (which were originally conceptualized as a single chapter). Also a bit on how Julia Kristeva helped me through this chapter and Chapter 20.

Y’all, the difficulty of talking about one thread of this 13-21 arc, when increasingly all the threads are present but none of them are resolved, just continues to intensify as I go on. I had another subject planned out for this week, but then I realized I’d been assuming knowledge that is actually only revealed in 21, so… that won’t work. My style of narrative investment hews so much toward emotional arcs and so little toward concrete “plot spoilers”—even plot spoilers that are only spoilers for emotional arcs—that I have a hard time not just thinking of everything that happens in the story and before the story as existing simultaneously, they way they would for a person doing a re-read. I guess this is why most people who watch actual DVD extras generally watch the movie first, all the way through, and DVD extras only later. 

HOWEVER. I’m soldiering on. I think I can talk fairly usefully about the earlier stages of my thinking re: Sherlock Holmes’s reactions to getting cheated on by John, a person he thought he knew for sure would never cheat on him. 

So, something that was clear to me really early was that, in addition to the complex of pain, betrayal, jealousy, anger, insecurity, etc. that anyone feels when a partner unexpectedly violates the terms of their relationship, this situation is especially confronting for Sherlock because his whole professional self-concept (which is, to a large extent, his entire self-concept) is built on this idea of drawing conclusions from the empirical observation of people. Obviously, _Sherlock_ (and other) fanfic uses this family of contradictions all the time, whether it’s formulated as safe intellectualism versus dangerous emotionalism; or a familiarity with the external homicidal after-effects of passion versus ignorance of everyday internal reality of passion; or compulsive self-control versus the possibility of human connection; or any number of other, related possibilities, often in the context of reluctance to enter a sexual/romantic relationship and/or inability to perceive passion on the part of the other person. The specific slant on it I was interested in, here, was—

So, maybe I should self-disclose that I’m writing from a place of both having cheated on a partner and having been cheated on by one—well, by multiple ones, but one that really counted. And in both cases, finding myself in that position was, uh, different than I had imagined it would be. This was true in many ways, one of which was the way psychological ramifications of what had happened kind of rippled out, from the act itself, and made me ask really destabilizing questions about my relationships and my assumptions and also just about who I was as a person. I had imagined infidelity, I think, as a detonation with a pretty clear and predictable trajectory of damage; but actually it wasn’t like that at all. Instead it brought up all kinds of issues that seemed at first only tangentially related, or which had been unclear to me, or which I’d been trying very hard not to think about. For Sherlock, he’s being confronted with evidence that, not only is his knowledge of John incomplete, it’s so vastly incomplete that he has let himself feel (nearly) 100% secure in the knowledge that John would never do a thing that John has now, demonstrably, done; and that brings into question a bunch of other assumptions Sherlock has spent the last eighteen years considering inviolate. For example: “knowledge gleaned through observation is reliable”; and “when I feel really good during a case that means something about me and what I’m doing”; and “through observing another person closely over a length of time, it’s possible to know them in some meaningful way.” In other words, John’s actions with Daniel destabilize, not only Sherlock’s understanding of who John is, but also his understanding of who he himself is, and his relationship with his avocation/profession/art-form, and his understanding of the ability of humans to connect meaningfully to other humans at all. 

(There are additional reasons that this reaction is amplified for Sherlock in this time & place, which I won’t go into here. But the basis of it started, for me, with just thinking about his character, and thinking about my own experiences, and extrapolating the emotional arc from there.)

And then I think there’s a “perfect storm” element happening, too, in this chapter and 20, where all of the different threads that are being tugged at by John’s betrayal and their subsequent fight, are exacerbating each other and pulling each other tight. Sherlock is desperately craving the reassurance of human connection, but trying to connect with a person (any person) he thought he knew, is too painful because he now questions whether it was possible to know them at all. Professionalism is often a sanctuary for him, so he tries to escape into the work; but his relationship with the work is also under attack. Likewise, he feels an affinity with the sex worker Rachel based on the fact that she’s very skilled at the part of her job, which consists, in part, of using a consciously-crafted persona to manipulate people (Sherlock: “I’m ALSO good at my job which consists in art of using personae to manipulate people!”). But the combination of her professional persona (designed to foster a connection with her clients and perform emotional labor for them, giving enough of herself that they feel they know her) with the enforced superficiality of their interaction (in which Sherlock is a potential client, not a friend and not even a regular, who actually doesn’t know this woman at all, and that boundary is, for good reason, very mediated) brings up the newly-perceived distance between himself and even those other people he thought he knew intimately, like John, and Claudine. There’s this sense in which, every direction he tries to turn to escape his mental booby-trap restricts his motion in another direction. This sort of emotional predicament bondage was a lot of what I spend several revision passes on this chapter and Chapter 20 tightening up.

As a closing note (and possibly more on this next time): once I actually got to the point of starting to write this section, it was difficult to “get” the specific quality of Sherlock’s fractured narration, especially since it had to be distinct from John’s differently-fractured narration in 13 and 15. I found myself reading Julia Kristeva at one point (like you do) and came across this passage, on abjection, which flipped a switch in my brain kind of unlocked my ability to think about this chapter duo. I kept it open in a floating sticky note on my computer desktop for the entire time I was writing and revising 18 and 20, it was an incredibly useful flashlight lighting my way:

  
  
It gets even more relevant in 20, but I think it’s already an interesting little companion passage for 18. For… whatever that’s worth!

Next time: Notes on breaking a personal… not rule, but preference.


	19. DVD Extras: Chapter 19: The movement of pain that is painless and motionless

**(Earlier)**

**In which John, fresh from his fight with Sherlock, storms out of their hotel room and ends up at Le Chabanais, where he witnesses Irene Adler leaving with Germaine Beaumont. As it starts to rain, John follows them to Irene’s second set of rooms, where he stands guard all night watching for movement and mulling over his relationships with Sherlock and Daniel.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on going against my own grain and writing a pivotal “I love you” in this chapter:

Those who’ve been around here a while probably remember that I have an [ongoing series of posts](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16831159) detailing my reservations about the weight that we as a society put on the moment when one person says “I love you” to another person, both in life and fiction. If you don’t feel like following that link, the TL;DR of the entire thread is: a lot of romantic fiction puts a high narrative importance, and expectation of resolution or catharsis, on one character saying “I love you” to another character. In many (though certainly not all) cases these moments ring a bit hollow for me because either (a) the character has already amply demonstrated through their actions that they love the other person, in which case the declaration is nice, I suppose, but hardly a revelation; or (b) the character hasn’t demonstrated their love through action, in which case the declaration is meaningless since love, in order to make sense to me, has to be primarily something you do, not something you feel. 

I think another way to say this is that I’m always conscious of the extent to which just saying these words, in isolation, comes up short of really _meaning_ … much. Or: that they’re chameleon words; words whose specific meaning alters drastically based on the context in which they’re said and the actions that surround the saying of them. And generally, whenever I find them effective in fiction, it’s in a context that somehow acknowledges or uses that. 

Unsurprisingly, the fact that I’ve thought so much about this makes me hyper-conscious of “I love you”s in my own stuff. I did a search through all of my fic on AO3: there is only one in-story “I love you,” and it’s… complicated, but the character who says it—while she does probably “love” her undead life partner—is largely saying “I love you” when she says it in order to get out of answering a more difficult question. (I wrote more about this moment in [this post](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16831159/chapters/39510070); it happens in [The Spirit of Enquiry](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8884963).) 

All of which is to say that for a long time, I just didn’t write this phrase; I’ve written plenty of things where I think it’s very clear to both the audience and the characters involved that they love each other; and I’ve written other things where that’s clear to the audience but maybe not clear to the characters; and yet other things where the characters might think it’s clear but the audience might ( _hopefully_ ) have reservations about that. But I haven’t written a lot of things where a character makes that “I love you” claim, up front, in a way that’s meant to be taken seriously at face value… whatever “face value” even means here. But lately, in part as a result of the post thread linked above—and in particular [these exchanges](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16831159/chapters/39510070) with @little-brisk—and also as a result of talking a lot with [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) about her use of “I love you”s in [build your wings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4100593), I’ve been broadening the way I conceptualize fictional “I love you”s, and starting to think about the diversity of ways it can be a useful tool. 

And John, in this chapter, does have an “I love you” that’s meant to be taken seriously in the sense of—oh—being a desperate and genuinely-felt attempt to commune and communicate with, and demonstrate his commitment to, and also repair damage between himself and, another person. I’m thinking of this bit, when John, who has been standing in the rain feeling progressively more and more panicked and regretful about his part in the fight they had a few hours before, leaves his stake-out of Irene’s second set of rooms to try to get in touch with Sherlock by telephone:

> He had a momentary flash of that different Sherlock, the London Sherlock, with his raised eyebrow and his _What’s this, Watson? Leaving your observation post just when the subject showed herself?_ and John rested his forehead against the glass of the box and thought, _I’ll make it up to you please, thought darling, I can explain_.  
>   
> But the front desk clerk came back on the line. _Pas de réponse_ , monsieur: but John had worked that out for himself. He felt his spine sag, then straighten.  
>   
> ‘Bon,’ he said, and put aside a dozen questions, requests he could have made in English, and said, 'Un—un—a message, je peux—leave him a message.’ He couldn’t make it a question. It was a demand.  
>   
> 'Oui,’ the man said. 'Un moment.’  
>   
> There was a sound of rummaging and then the man said, in a heavy Parisian accent, 'Go ahead,’ and with a surge of gratitude out of all proportion with two words in his native tongue John said, 'Write—write.’ he licked his lips. 'I’m so dreadfully sorry—’ paltry, '—please for—no, I.’ Clearing his throat. 'Please—don’t leave Paris until I get back—’ his battering heart, '—I—’ _darling_ '—want—no—’ it was hard labour; but it was the Continent; but it was a written record, and inadequate besides; but it was Sherlock, imagining John wanted to hurt him, imagining John was leaving him, imagining John had been, been _biding time_ with him the past year, so '—I, I love you,’ John told the front desk clerk at the Hôtel Bel Ami, and waited, head pressed to the glass, for the man to recoil.  
>   
> 'C'est tout?’ he said, instead, sounding coolly professional. Like he did this every day. John closed his eyes.  
>   
> 'Oui,’ he told him. 'Just—make sure he gets that, when he gets in.’

  
As you might expect, this made me kind of uncomfortable, mid-composition. (What else is new, in this novel.) I tinkered with that passage a lot, taking out the “I love you” and putting it back in, trying to figure out if I thought it was effective or not. I ended up liking it, I think, because it happens within the context of John grappling with the inadequacy of every action it’s possible for him to take in this moment, and everything it’s possible for him to say. He can’t get in touch with Sherlock; he doesn’t know where he is. He can’t take back his actions with Daniel, or the things he said during the fight with Sherlock, or the things he might have failed to correct the wrong impressions which—John is realizing as he mentally rehashes their fight—Sherlock has obviously formed about John’s attitudes toward his relationships with both Daniel and John. So there’s this inchoate, emotionally devastating mass of failures and regrets that John is grappling with, and what he has to work with is just, like—language. He doesn’t even have face-to-face language here, just a bad telephone connection to the front desk clerk at his hotel; but even if he were face to face with Sherlock, there’s this sense in which… There is all this language of endearment and extremity bubbling up in him—don’t leave me, I love you, and also the repeated “darling,” which is not something they generally call each other. And actually saying those things in a third-party message feels at once viscerally inadequate and worn thin by clichéd overuse; and also hugely dangerous, physically and legally—because he is conditioned by a lifetime spent in a country with anti-sodomy laws, despite not being in one at the moment. But despite both those objections they’re the only things he’s left with that express any part of his messy, desperate desire for reconnection and repair with Sherlock, and he can’t bear not to make some kind of attempt. So he says them, or some of them. I think I like this “I love you” because there’s a contextual acknowledgement that it doesn’t communicate very much of what the character saying it means, in the moment; but it’s still the best he can come up with.

But I’m still not totally sure! Ahahaha. Such is life. 

Next time: the second half of the thoughts I started in my notes on Chapter 15, on rendering non-verbal mental states in prose.


	20. DVD Extras: Chapter 20: Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception

**(Later)**

**In which Sherlock has some A+, fail-proof ideas about how to come to terms with his feelings about the dilemmas of John, Claudine, his last eighteen years of life choices, and the existential impossibility of knowing another person.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on writing Sherlock’s bad trip, and distinguishing it from John’s bad PTSD experience in Chapter 15:

Back in my [notes on Chapter 15](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17231921/chapters/40525991), I mentioned the challenge, both in 15 and 20, of rendering mental states that don’t have a lot of access to language, or in which the usual linkages between signifiers and signifieds breaks down. In 15 that’s because John’s having a dissociative break following his encounter with Daniel in 13; in 20 it’s because Sherlock is cocktailing a caffeine/cocaine mixture with, eventually, injected morphine, and has a period after the morphine where his thought processes are slowed down and redirected into unusual channels. What I couldn’t really talk about back then, is that only were both of these mental states challenging to represent with words, because they both have limited or non-standard access to language, but the quality of their access or non-access to language is pretty distinct from one another. (Although, they do share some qualities that made them hard to detangle. For example, both John in 15 and Sherlock in 20 go through a period where they stop using pronouns/stop referring to the self. Also, both states are bound up with revulsion, though in different ways.)

I wrote in the [linked post](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17231921/chapters/40525991) about the personal experiences off of which I based the dissociation in Chapter 15, and I’m just going to excerpt that post: the experience, for me, is one of feeling “as if a corrupted palimpsest of previous versions of my body have been pasted on top of my current one by a five-year-old with poor hand-eye coordination” and as a result the body “becomes a center for a lot of deep, panicked, wordless revulsion—I viscerally want to put that body part out of sight […] so as not to have to continue dealing with it" while at the same time the link between my subjective reality and the language I can access, breaks down. In this mindset, which I drew on for John’s narration in the opening of 15, the body and hence the “self” becomes an object of revulsion that he is actively trying to cast off. When John stops referring to himself, or uses “it” pronouns—which he never manages to do for very long, but keeps lapsing into for short stretches—it’s because he’s actively reacting to his revulsion to self and body, and trying to get more distance from them:

> Could—could sleep. Bright blood-dark shivering in the blue sun bright dark blood. Shifted careful on its side trying. Putting the here part outside just a bit outside. If he could. Curl it up make it sleep.

  
Even in this short paragraph, which is at the height of his attempts to distance himself from his body/self, there’s a moment when he lapses back into “he” (”If he could”); because the sensation of distress here is so linked to that poorly-aligned palimpsest feeling. He can’t be fully a “he” and he can’t be fully an “it” and he can’t cut out the selfhood altogether.

Sherlock in Chapter 20 is both similar, and kind of the opposite. I don’t have personal experience of Sherlock’s particular drug cocktail, but I do have vicarious experience being around people on cocaine. (A tangent, but I have to confess that writing the cocaine section of this chapter, in which Sherlock is a total asshole in that quintessentially cocaine way where the person doing the cocaine believes they’re experiencing extreme mental and emotional clarity but in reality they’re just being insufferably aggressive and condescending to everyone around them, gave me LIFE, oh man, I still find it totally hilarious and cathartic.) I also have personal experience of being on opiates, and of overdosing (though not on opiates). All of which was to some extent useful for writing this chapter. In particular the way that Sherlock’s near-OD experience see-saws between pleasure and sickness, and in and out of an unconsciousness that is like a wave rising up and whelming him; and the way manifestations of emotion—like laughter—sort of materialize unannounced out of a sea of languor, and then vanish equally unexpectedly; and the way his revulsion and feeling of adamant separation from things that are normally repellant (vomit, for example) are suppressed—all that was as I remember; though thankfully at this point it’s been a while.

But that last thing, that almost-complete suppression of the revulsion instinct: I feel like that’s the real difference between Sherlock on morphine in 20 and John in the park in 15—and also a big difference between Sherlock in 18/early 20, before he turns to chemical assistance with his messy feelings, and Sherlock in late 20. In my [notes on 18](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17231921/chapters/40526549) I posted a Julia Kristeva quote on the abject, which reads in part:

> [The abject] lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. A certainty protects it from the shameful—a certainty of which it is proud holds onto it. But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. 

  
I’m very far from a Kristeva expert; in fact I have no idea if I’m even interpreting her “correctly.” But certain phrases in this passage became sort of beacon lighthouses as I tried to navigate Sherlock’s 18-to-20 arc: in particular “a certainty of which it is proud holds onto it” and “a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself”—which is also a decent description of John’s mindset in 15. In Sherlock’s case, throughout 18 and the early part of 20, his perception of the physically abject and repulsive has been bound up with his aversion to confronting all the larger ramifications of John’s actions & what they mean for Sherlock’s own concept of himself and the world. So, for example, in 18, he has this moment in the washroom where he’s nauseated and thinks that he would feel better if he just let himself throw up:

> Sinking-feeling; spinning-feeling in the dark. Why not let himself, he thought. Would probably feel better if he could bring something up. Anything—but the thought of it. Long sticky strings snapping off his lips and the whisky smell, he didn't—didn’t want. Shut his mouth hard and told himself you have to. If only there were a window in this room. Fresh air. He said to himself, The presence of contradictory evidence only means. And upstairs there would be. And John—  
>   
> Sherlock could. (Pale brown puddle on porcelain. Didn’t want.) He could walk out. Just go back to the hotel. Why not? John would come back, if only to. (Lips pressed together tight tight breathe.) If only to collect his things. Perhaps he could explain to Sherlock, and Sherlock could believe him.

  
He’s in this situation where he feels like he’s suddenly able to perceive a festering, repulsive underlayer, atop which the world he thought he could depend on may or may not be resting. His options are (1) to attempt to ignore that new perception and live as a comforting simulacrum of the person he was before (”Perhaps he could explain to Sherlock, and Sherlock could believe him.”), or (2) sink into the repulsive underlayer and just live there, at rock bottom, which he finds viscerally repellant and terrifying (”Didn’t want”), or (3) to cling to his old certainties and get them to carry him through by brute force (“Shut his mouth hard and told himself _you have to_ ”). Option #1 is what he more or less tries in 14, in the abortive sex scene where he tries to skip over the messy feelings that betrayal brings up, and just go directly to the part where there can be a genuinely-felt reconciliation. Shockingly, that doesn’t work, so he tries repeatedly to go with Option #3; but throughout 20 #2 just encroaches more and more dramatically on him, until he can’t keep it at bay without cocaine; and then the unexpected/mis-labeled morphine sort of swamps even his revulsion and terror about #2—even the self that feels that terror and revulsion—and he’s left just sort of… hanging out there, part of the effluvia at the gross bottom of everything.

So, in contrast to John’s repeated, willed, and short-lived attempts to put his body/self aside in 15, Sherlock in the morphine section of 20 has long periods where his narration doesn’t perceive or refer to any self at all, any separation between “Sherlock” and “the place where Sherlock is” and “the things that Sherlock is doing”:

> Again blue. Blink open blue square blue square blue. White between. White, then eggwhite-slick. Clear-cloudy shining in the cracks. Blink closed. Glistening. That’s the word. God, the waves.  
>   
> Blink open. Glisten. G—listen. Head down push at it sticky. List. Listen. Push down pull thuck fingers thuck thuck unsticking. The waves feel the waves feel the waves—  
>   
> Hook gut to back-throat. Open lips and it falls out in tacky rivulets: thin, thinner. Slipping slipping stretching to pool on tile then Snap. Bottom lip acid-wet.  
>   
> Cheek shoulder hip thigh to tile. In the calm the water feels… Sinking dark.

  
In Sherlock’s case this isn’t willed; in fact the ability to will is one of the things that, at least for me, gets wiped out in a situation like this—minus the sporadic pleasure it’s similar to being very ill, in that way. One just has to exist for a time, at a really basal level.

ANYWAY I have now written 1500 words and haven’t even started to touch on the final scene of this chapter, which was basically the #1 reason I wanted to write this entire novel. So maybe Gins and I will talk about it next time! In another instalment of DVD Extras: Audio Edition.


	21. DVD Extras: Chapter 21: With such permanence as time has

**(Now)**

**In which Sherlock and John, both much the worse for one of the worst weekends of their lives, are reunited in their hotel room and fumble their way toward some measure of peace.**

***

At the link: another audio version of DVD extras notes with special guest [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile). Topics include: Claudine’s relationships with women, and Sherlock’s relationship to queerness (hers and his own); Sherlock and Irene’s twinned mother issues and illusory queer utopias envisioned in childhood; the role of art in the interpersonal dynamics in the novel (with not-exactly-digressions into the work/lives of Kaitlyn Greenidge, Hawthorne & Melville, and Woolf and Sackville-West), and which parts of Chapter 20 made it worth it to me to spend five years writing this book.

####  [LISTEN HERE!](https://www.dropbox.com/s/1d5mtgda09trxur/Ch%2021%20master%20final2.mp3?raw=1)


	22. DVD Extras: Chapter 22: Observe disease in signatures, and tragedy from fingers

**(Now)**

**In which Sherlock, John, and assorted members of the Roz Ven gang meet at Germaine Beaumont’s apartment to strategize about entrapment at the upcoming fancy-dress fête.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on the weird structure of this novel and suddenly having to broaden the focus back out to an ensemble cast after three years of writing intensely interior, one- or two-person scenes:

Sooooooo, remember when this was a mystery novel? Yeah, the me who turned from a completed Chapter 21 draft and revision had halfway forgotten, too.

One of the amazing things, I think, about really working to embrace the act of writing an unpublishable novel for an extremely small audience, is you can try a lot of weird experimental shit and learn from what works and what doesn’t—because there’s no one telling you what not to do. The bizarre structure of _A hundred hours_ was one of many of those experiments. It was definitely intentional, and I think it sort of works… but it also creates some definite challenges. 

This much was intentional: the first twelve chapters set up a more or less traditional (if anxiety-riddled and x-rated) country house mystery; then, with John and Daniel’s encounter in Chapter 13, it’s as if an emotional bomb goes off in the midst of the expected plot—or actually, maybe more like the structure of the plot _im_ plodes. The chronology fractures apart, with John’s point-of-view chapters from 13-21 being told in flashback and Sherlock’s point-of-view chapters continuing the present narration (and also with the effects of the Chapter 13 bomb rippling back out into earlier chapters, e.g. 7 on). From 7 on, too, character interactions start to narrow and intensify: in the early part of the book there are a lot of huge ensemble scenes, with large groups of characters interacting, and their interactions overlapping; whereas from 7 on and even more so from 13 on, characters tend to interact only in intense, one-on-one situations—Sherlock and Irene’s catfight in 7/8, Sherlock and John’s fight in 14, John and Daniel’s art night in 17, the long reconciliation sequence in 21—and there is a LOT of time when nobody is interacting at all, and we just have a single character is isolated with their own thoughts and feelings (for example, the entirety of Chapter 19). 

I really wanted that sense of a detonation that ripples out and leaves in its wake a sense of isolation and untethered-ness. It’s almost like an emotional version of the tinnitus that follows a loud bang close to one’s ear ~~and now I’m cracking up over this unexpected connection between _A hundred hours_ and the characters of Archer going “meep meep.”~~ That sudden, ringing aloneness, that feeling of having your customary source of human connection become suddenly a source of disruption instead; the sense of being cut loose from an emotional “home,” is an aspect that I wanted to capture both of dealing with betrayal and with the return of repressed trauma. The way in which much of the supporting cast seems to fall away, leaving John and Sherlock each marooned within their own subjectivities—that part works, I think, in terms of mirroring how it feels (at least to me) to be wandering around in the wake of an event that feels personally cataclysmic like this. 

I also really wanted the sense of the _expected narrative_ being disrupted, of the world being fractured, which is SUCH a classic element of post-WWI fiction. I liked—still like—the idea of that expected narrative being set up really explicitly within the novel itself, and then having it blown apart by the war + betrayal combination. This part I think works less completely. I do like what it does for the John/Daniel/Sherlock war-art-and-love arc, which is what I engineered it to highlight. But I had no idea, going into this novel, that (a) that arc would end up being so difficult or so long, or (b) that that would mean it diverged so drastically in mood and focus from the early, house-party chapters, and © how that made it difficult, in turn, to resolve or even continue in a satisfying way certain character threads from the house-party section. This isn’t so much true of Irene, since she never wholly fades away as a point-of-view character, and also because I know there is another (at least one) future piece of her arc. But for other characters—particularly for Claudine and her relationship with Hélène Picard, which is frankly at least as messy as John and Sherlock’s—the way the detonation at the center of this novel pulled me away from them, made it jarring to come back to them in the aftermath without feeling like I was trivializing them. If I were planning a similar structure in the future, I would give some thought to how to deal with this better: either to find some way of making sure priority characters remain present, or to deal explicitly with the fallout of the point-of-view characters’ self-isolation. 

In any case, with the exception of Irene’s brief visit to La Garçonnière, this chapter—22—is the first time since Chapter 6 that a large group of people are all gathered together and our narrative point of view is in the middle of that interaction. (As opposed to, say, Sherlock’s scenes in the salon at Le Chabanais, where he is watching large numbers of people interact with one another, but he himself is really only interacting with Mrs Kelly and then with Rachel.) And while the ostensible mystery/McGuffin hunt element of the plot never fully fades, thanks to Irene, it’s also the first time since Sherlock’s interview with Agnès Humbert that he or John is directly engaging with it. I had all the little plotty stuff relating to the photographs, Irene, the Jouvenels, etc. planned out well in advance of even starting Chapter 1, and I wrote it all down—which is lucky, because by the time I went to start this last 22-24 arc, FIVE YEARS HAD PASSED. It was really bizarre going back and picking up the threads and little hints that I’d dropped in very early chapters and then, honestly, completely forgotten about in the epic battle that was writing 13-21. I kept looking through old notes and exclaiming to [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) over and over, “This was SO LONG AGO!!” Her: “I know!” Me: “It just feels CRAZY it was so long ago!” Her: “It was five years ago!” Me: “That’s BANANAS.” (This went on for some time.) But my earlier self’s meticulous outlining really saved my ass, I have to say, just like I was super grateful to her while I was working on Chapter 16. Getting the photograph stuff in order was a matter of just following my outline.

What was more difficult was keeping some of the tonal gravity and intensity of Sherlock’s subjectivity coming out of 13-21, while still starting to transition to a more public, outward-facing mode of being. At this point the timelines are knit back up and the immediate aftermath of the detonation is starting to settle, but both Sherlock and John are still really raw and unsure, and I wanted to capture that while still getting them back to a place where they are somewhat able to function in the outside world. This was a challenge in this chapter and maybe even more in the next… which I’ll talk about next week. 

Next time: Notes on writing Claire Boas’s costume party.


	23. DVD Extras: Chapter 23: But you are the music, while the music lasts

**(Now)**

**In which John, Sherlock, and their co-conspirators, as well as the Jouvenels, the Humberts, Irene, and most of the rest of Paris all attend Claire Boas’s fête. Some things go to plan. Others, not so much.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on coming back to plot-related plans I made literally five years before, and adapting the tone of this party scene from my original expectations to fit the novel I was ending up with:

I wrote in my [notes on Chapter 22](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17231921/chapters/40528166) that I it was an odd feeling finally referring back to a logistical outline that I’d made years and years before. That feeling doubled when I got to 23, and the party scene. I have a vivid memory of a winter back in Portland, in my old apartment—which was built in 1910, with single-paned windows on two exposed sides because it was an upper-floor corner unit—when it got so cold that I moved my armchair directly in front of the radiator, piled all my blankets on top of me in the armchair, and spent the evening with a bottle of red wine on chat with [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile), telling her the story of Irene’s photographs and how this party scene would eventually play out. Looking back through our chat logs, this conversation turns out to have happened in February of 2014, aka the month when I ended up walking all the way from North Portland to downtown in 10-degree weather and 4″ heels because I didn’t want to stop moving long enough to wait for a cab. A cab! This is before I had Lyft or Uber on my phone; that is how long ago it was. 

In that frozen, wine-fueled conversation, the tone really stresses the sort of farcical aspects of the dynamics amongst the Charles/Henry/Colette/Germaine/Irene contingent—everyone sleeping with each other, resenting each other, double-crossing each other, etc. This is all more or less historically accurate (with the exception, obviously, of fictional Irene), and I still do find it hilarious, especially since so many of these people took themselves so seriously in the moment. I had written “The Obvious and Proper Sense” not too long before, and if anything I found Colette and her coterie even more ridiculous than Lytton et al. So when I was outlining the course of this plotline and the party to Gins, I was telling it in this sort of rollicking, burlesque way that played up the comedy of interpersonal absurdity. 

The problem, obviously, is that by the time I got through 13-21, that tone was no longer remotely appropriate, because things had shifted so much more introspective and darker—and however appealingly ridiculous the Jouvenels are, they’re still being observed through the point of view of either John or Sherlock. Even back in February 2014 I knew to a certain extent that this would happen, but I had no concept of how extreme the shift would be, or what a large lift it would seem to come back from it. “Interpersonal absurdity” was still a relevant note, especially since both John (POV character in this chapter) and Sherlock (POV character in the last) are just coming out of two days and probably 50,000 words each of intensely inward-focused trauma processing; and rejoining the society of other people when you’re coming off a jag like that is always disorienting. I liked that disorientation, how difficult it is to project a “normal” outward-facing self—the uncomfortable rubbed-raw feeling of human interaction chafing against you at a moment when you feel ill-equipped, improperly rooted in your own personhood. John’s particular issues with wanting to feel that he’s equipped and capable of being a caring partner to Sherlock, extremely recent evidence to the contrary, plays into this “How do I person?” feeling nicely, I think: his sense of purpose as he’s despatched to go pick up costumes for the two of them, and then his deflation when even that assignment doesn’t go to plan.

But I needed to skew the interpersonal absurdity less bedroom-farcical and more grotesque and claustrophobic, for the party scene to work. There were certain elements that could work both ways: the absurd costumes that John and Sherlock end up in (shoutout to [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) for casting Sherlock as Cupid), Sherlock’s crankiness about other party-goers who don’t take the theme seriously; basically all of the actions of the other guests—all of those could add to either a rollicking vibe or an oppressive, overwhelmed vibe, depending on the perceptions of the POV character. But it took a sort of 60-degree mental rotation, and a few false starts on this chapter, for me to adapt my original tone-vision into something that worked with the chapters that came before. The oppressiveness of the heat and of John’s costume helped, and the physical distance between the two of them. That feeling of being at a party where the density of the crowd fluctuates dramatically at certain tipping points that you may miss while paying attention to something else—you turn around and suddenly the crowd is suffocatingly tight, or it’s inexplicably thinned out. I like the effect of the eerie in basically “realistic” (whatever that means) writing—situations where there’s nothing supernatural going on, but because of the way the POV character is experiencing the world around them, or because of some not-yet-glimpsed plot or character element, the scene nonetheless feels unnerving, uncanny. I think party scenes provide a lot of scope for this kind of thing, because of the heightened quality of parties—everyone is themselves but slightly skewed, whether because of booze or drugs or just because of the amped-up energy required to project one’s personality in the presence of so many other people. Also because of parties’ ever-shifting, ever-changing quality, and because of the sometimes-overwhelming glut of incoming sense data. My personal tolerance for being at parties is (probably obviously, from the above paragraph) pretty limited: I enjoy them but I usually don’t stay long because I quickly become overwhelmed. But I feel like that sense of overwhelmed-ness ended up being useful in writing John’s POV in his chapter, as he tries to focus on the outside while (a) suffocating in the heat and (b) still intensely preoccupied with the state of his relationship with Sherlock. 

Next time: Uh. Final thoughts, I guess? 24 is the final chapter, which is wild!


	24. DVD Extras: Chapter 24: Here between the hither and the farther shore

**(Now)**

**In which Sherlock and John, later joined by Germaine Beaumont, pursue Irene across Paris. Later, as the sun comes up and Germaine heads home, they walk along the bank of the Seine, feeling their way back to one another.**

***

DVD extra navel-gazing on the revision history of this chapter vis-a-vis Sherlock’s relationships with John and Irene.

Also: IT’S ALL UP! THE END!

So I’m sitting here in my parents’ garden, thinking about what to say about the end of this novel. 

I wrote “It… was quite a ride!” and then my brain kind of shorted out and I just stared at the birch tree for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes well spent.

But, okay. When I was plotting out this chapter, I knew that it would have to resolve John and Sherlock’s arc (as much as their arc will ever get resolved) and set up Irene for the next story in this universe. One of the many things that bothers me about the canonical BBC interpretation of Irene Adler is that the writers, contrary to the original Doyle story, (a) have her fall “in love” with Sherlock Holmes (whatever that means; they don’t exactly interrogate it), and (b) write that “love” to be a weakness: the seed of her downfall; so that instead of neatly outsmarting Holmes as she did back in 1891, her affection makes her clumsy and she is instead outsmarted by him. I fervently hate both of these creative choices, even before you factor into the mix that BBC Irene self-identifies as gay—though, make no mistake: I also hate their decision to have the only lesbian on their show who gets meaningful screen time, fall for their leading man. 

There are a whole cluster of ideas wrapped up in BBC Irene’s depiction that I wanted to challenge in this novel, even if it is radically AU. I wanted to challenge the idea that obsessive fascination with another person, like the kind Irene has for Colette in this novel and BBC Irene has for Sherlock, equates to loving them. I also wanted to challenge the idea that loving someone, in the truer sense of working to support their mental and emotional well-being, is a weakness. I wanted to challenge the idea that self-identified lesbians are only looking for the right man. And at the same time, I wanted to explore a little bit how a person who has trained herself relentlessly to remain an island and also to sexualize all interactions and use that sexualization to gain power over other people, experiences (a) an interpersonal connection that feels to her, at its heart, genuine but not particularly sexual (with Sherlock) and (b) any interpersonal connections, sexual or not, in which the push-pull power dynamic starts to break down (with Germaine, but also with all the people at La Garçonnière who probably consider Irene a friend). 

Long story short, I knew I wanted Irene to walk away with her photographs under her own control, but starting to do some intense questioning about her compulsive self-isolation. The moment in the train station, where Irene is unable to follow through on her offer to take Germaine abroad with her, but at the same time half-reaches out to Sherlock by reverse-pickpocketing him one of her photographs, ended up being one of the more unexpectedly satisfying ones of the novel, and sets up the next story nicely, I think. And I wanted Sherlock and John to manage things well enough to put Claudine’s mind at rest and puncture Charles Humbert’s blowhard-ness, but not to come out 100% on top. At one point [greywash](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/profile) and I were talking about the final “scores” for all the major players in AHH, and she said something like, “So it’s Sherlock and John - 1 point, Irene Adler - 30 points,” which I think is pretty accurate. Sherlock and John aren’t in the red, but Irene, though a piece of work, is definitely further into the black. 

The revision history of this chapter echoed my preoccupation with Irene’s triumph and her nascent connection with Sherlock—at first too much so. Gins’s major note on the first final-ish draft was that I needed to revise back more toward genuine feeling between Sherlock and John, and away from a kind of bleak, long-distance recognition between Sherlock and Irene. I think I was already starting to transition along the arc of the next story, so my first-draft Sherlock was devoting me levels of thought, rather than Sherlock levels of thought, to Irene; and as a result the reader got no Sherlock POV chapter in which the (tentative) reestablishment of connection between Sherlock and John was palpable in the way that it is in John’s POV in Chapter 21. Luckily I have an editor with a very good grasp of point-of-view, and also emotional arcs. I hope there’s now a focus on the beginnings of John/Sherlock rebuilding, particularly in the scenes outside Irene’s (now Léonie’s) rooms, and the walk along the Seine that ends the book.

Anyway, THANKS FOR READING, everyone. It’s been a wild ride. And thanks for indulging these notes. If anyone who’s been waiting to read it ends up with further questions I would of course be open to them, but by and large I think I’m finally pretty ready to let go of this project, long and rewarding as it’s been.


End file.
